Sunday, April 3, 2011

Fun Facts

The symbols + and –, referring to addition and subtraction, first appeared in 1456 in an unpublished manuscript by the mathematician Johann Regiomontanus (a.k.a. Johann Müller). The plus symbol, as an abbreviation for the Latin et (and), was found earlier in a manuscript dated 1417; however, the downward stroke was not quite vertical.


In 1631, the multiplication symbol × was introduced by the English mathematician William Oughtred (1574–1660) in his book Keys to Mathematics, published in London. Incidentally, this Anglican minister is also famous for having invented the slide rule, which was used by generations of scientists and mathematicians. The slide rule’s doom in the mid-1970s, due to the pervasive influx of inexpensive pocket calculators, was rapid and unexpected.

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