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I'm guessing shmageggy thought the notation was Big-O notation. It's a bit of CS notation that defines an upper bound on the number of operations for an algorithm as a function of input size.

I don't know enough about particle physics to know whether you and him/her are even remotely close to saying the same thing.

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It's math notation invented for analytic number theory that got popularized in CS by Donald Knuth.

By definition, constant (nonzero) arguments denote the same class, so using constants different from 1 isn't really useful. However, the O stands for 'order' or 'order of', and it sometimes gets (ab)used to denote orders of magnitude (eg powers of 10) of finite values instead of limiting behaviour of functions.

I did. I've never seen it used in another way. TIL

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