A very simple question: can the word max be used in academic (conference/journal publications or books)?
When searching for 'max number' using Google Scholar, I get 33,400 results.
When searching for 'maximum number' on the hand, I get 1,590,000 results.
It depends on the style guide of the journal of interest. From my technical editing experience, I suspect that at the minimum, "max" would be changed to "max." to indicate that it's an abbreviation for "maximum". This usage would be appropriate for circumstances where space is tight, as in a table cell or figure legend, for example. In the text, "max" would likely be changed to "maximum". In other words, "max" would not be considered appropriate for the academic literature except in familiar terms that are widely used—the only example I know of is the “max pooling” of neural networks.
