Is 'max' a proper word for academic writing?

Solution 1:

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.