Abstract Both ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ are words with a long polysemic history in Western culture. Moreover, the 120-year of modern semiotics movement has failed to provide highly needed definition these most basic terms, thus resulting ambiguity discipline itself. This paper proposes defining ‘sign/symbol’ as ‘a sensuous entity be regarded carrying meaning’. Furthermore, terminological chaos that a...

We define a two-dimensional Contou-Carrère symbol, which is a deformation of the two-dimensional tame symbol and is a natural generalization of the (usual) one-dimensional Contou-Carrère symbol. We give several constructions of this symbol and investigate its properties. Using higher categorical methods, we prove reciprocity laws on algebraic surfaces for this symbol. We also relate the two-dim...

An (m,m,m)-array of order n is an n×n array such that each cell is assigned a set of at most m symbols from {1, . . . , n} such that no symbol occurs more than m times in any row or column. An (m,m,m)-array is called avoidable if there exists a Latin square such that no cell in the Latin square contains a symbol that also belongs to the set assigned to the corresponding cell in the array. We sh...