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I was wondering if there was a formal or conventional method to represent an operator that has not yet been defined. I’m not talking about unary operators– I’m talking about things like addition. (+), subtraction (-), etc. I have seen people use a star symbol (★) before, but it is unclear as to whether this is of formal use or not.

Thank you in advance for your help and suggestions.

The_Animator
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  • You can talk about an $n$-ary operator, with the number of arguments $n$. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arity – Ethan Bolker Nov 05 '23 at 14:51
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    You are free to use any symbol you want in your own mathematical writings. The only requirement is that you say clearly what that symbol stands for and how it is used. You could write this, for example: Consider a binary operation $@$ on a set $X$, defined for any $x,y \in X$ with value $x@y \in X$. Even the $+$ symbol can be re-used, although there are a few conventions regarding its re-use (a binary operation denoted with $+$ should probably be commutative and associative). – Lee Mosher Nov 05 '23 at 14:53

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