How to organize lots of assumptions/equations in a math paper? (I need to refer to them in my main theorem) I'm writing a paper. It has a lot of lemmas that are used to prove a theorem. I put those lemmas first and then my put theorem at the end.
In the lemmas, I introduce assumptions (they're displayed equations that I label so I can recall them later) that are needed to prove the lemma.
Then at the end of the paper, when I get to my theorem, I say &quot;Let equations (1), (5), (21), (24) and (45) be true. Then this wonderful result is true: blah blah blah&quot;.
Now a referee for my paper said that it's not nice to do this because he/she has to go back to find (1) and then (5) and then (21) etc.
What's a good practice or the best practice for this? I could collect all of the assumptions right at the start and then refer to them separately later in the lemmas, which doesn't look nice, but then the theorem would look nice because I could say &quot;Let equations (1)-(5) be true...&quot; Another reason against doing this is that the assumptions are different in nature so it doesn't seem natural to put them together, especially if there are like 10 of them.
Does anyone have any advice or examples?
Possibly you could lessen the problem by also mentioning this in your introductory paragraphs, such as saying something along the lines of &quot;Our main result, Theorem 6, will follow from (1), (5), (21), (24), and (45).&quot; If the following applies, even better would be &quot;... and (45), which have independent interest&quot; (or &quot;which are of&quot;, or &quot;which we believe have&quot;, etc.).