Origins of some Math terms

Math Words Alphabetical Index

Abscissa is the formal term for the x-coordinate of a point

on a coordinate graph. The abscissa of the point (3,5) is
three. The word is a conjunction of ab(from) + scindere
(tear). Literally then, abscissa is a line that has been cut
or torn from another line. The main root is closely related
to the Latin root from which we get the word scissors. I
have a note that credits Leibniz with the orinin of the term
in 1692, but in 2006 I received a note from Professor Barney
Hughes that, "Fibonacci used the word in our meaning several
times in his book, De practica geometrie. " .
I read a blog (ok, I read it because it mentioned me..in
fact, misquoted me, but there was still some new stuff
there, so : They quoted Jeff Miller's site (always a good
bet to be very accurate) as saying that the first use was in
1659 in Miscellaneum Hyperbolicum, et Parabolicum by
Stephano degli Angeli. The site also quoted some translation
of the usage by Fibonacci, and the usage seemed distinctly
different than the present usage.. here is one for you to
decide. "Not to be overlooked is to show how to find the
square on line eb called the residue, recisum, or abscissa.
It is the difference between two lines commensurable only in
their squares, such as between lines ae and ab. For example,
let ae be the root of the rational number 720 and ab the
number 10. Because line ae was divided into two parts at
point b, the squares on lines ae and ab equal twice the
product of ab by ae and the square on line eb, as was shown
above. Therefore subtract twice the product of ab and ae
from the squares on lines ae and ab; that is, subtract 20
times the root of 720 from 820. Now 20 roots of 720 equal
the root of 288000, the number arising from the product of
400 the square of 20 and 720. The residue then is 820 less
the root of 288000"

Absolute Value The word absolute is from a variant of

absolve and has a meaning related to free from restriction
or condition. The first use of "absolute value" in English
seems to have been to apply to real values. Jeff Miller's

website on the Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of

Mathematics says," Absolute value is found in English in
1850 in The elements of analytical geometry; comprehending
the doctrine of the conic sections, and the general theory
of curves and surfaces of the second order by John Radford
Young (1799-1885): "we have AF the positive value of x equal
to BA - BF, and for the negative value, BF must exceed BA,
that is, F must be on the other side of A, as at F', hence
making AF' equal to the absolute value of the negative root
of the equation" [University of Michigan Digital Library]."
[See the page here] In 1876 Karl Weierstrass applied the
term to magnitude of complex numbers. From Miller's site
again we find "Absolute value was coined in German as
absoluten Betrag by Karl Weierstrass (1815-1897), who wrote:
Ich bezeichne den absoluten Betrag einer complex Groesse x
mit |x|. [I denote the absolute value of complex number x by
|x|.]"
In "The Words of Mathematics", Steven Schwartzman suggests
that the use of the word for real values only became common
in the middle of the 20th century. This may be true, but the
use for signed numbers also appears in 1889 by Wentworth
according to Miller; "In 1889, Elements of Algebra by G. A.
Wentworth has: 'Every algebraic number, as +4 or -4,
consists of a sign + or - and the absolute value of the
number; in this case 4.' " (above). In the 1893 edition of
the same book he uses the term again, as shown below,
without any symbol.

The revision of Hall and Knight's Algebra, for Colleges and

Schools {"Revised and Enlarged for the use of American
Schools"} by F. L. Sevenoak in 1905 also uses the term
without a sign. By 1934, the word is still used without
symbol in Walter W. Hart's Progressive First Algebra,(pg
78), but in the 1939 edition of College Algebra by Rosenbach

and Whitman, the symbol is used as shown below

The symbol for absolute value is usually a pair of vertical

lines containing the number, as created by Weierstrass in
1876 (see above). |3| is read as "The absolute value of
three". The absolute value of a real number is its distance
from zero, so |3| = |-3| = 3. In words that says that the
absolute value of three is equal to the absolute value of -3
, and that both have a value of three.
For complex numbers the absolute value is also called
magnitude or length of the complex number. Complex numbers
are sometimes drawn as a vector using an Argand Diagram, and
the length of the vector Z=a+bi is |a+bi|. Stated another
way, the value of |a+bi|=
A symbol for the Absolute Difference of two numbers, or the
absolute value of the difference was created by Oughtred
around 1630. Miller writes, "The tilde was introduced for
this purpose by William Oughtred (1574-1660) in the Clavis
Mathematicae (Key to Mathematics), composed about 1628 and
published in London in 1631, according to Smith, who shows a
reversed tilde (Smith 1958, page 394)." I have seen this
symbol used in an American text as late as 1893 when Irving
Stringham used it in his list of symbols in Uniplaner
Algebra. The symbol seems no longer to be common in basic
maths classes in the US or in England today. After posting a
request for information to the Historia Matematica
discussion group about the use of the tilde to indicate
absolute difference in England I received the following
update from Herbert Prinz:
"In modern English texts on navigation, nautical astronomy
or its history, the tilde is frequently used to express the
function | a - b |, where |x| stands for absolute value. E.
g. Cotter, The Complete Nautical Astronomer, 1969. I am not
sure when this practice started. In older texts on the same
subject, say, Moore, The Practical Navigator, 1800, one does
not find the tilde used in this way. For one, because

instructions were given mostly verbally without the use of

any symbols at all. And second, the distinction from '-' was
unnecessary, as it was always understood, if not explicitly
stated, that one must subtract the smaller
In England the absolute value is often referred to as the
modulus function, and the two bars that make up the symbol
are sometimes called "modulus signs" according to a note
posted by Vicky Neale on the Ask NRich math site. The term
modulus is used both in America and England to represent the
magnitude or length of a complex number. The term is also
used in a number of other specialty ways in mathematics, the
best known being the "congruence modulus". The modulus of a
congruence, often shortened to "mod" is the base value with
which the congruence is computed. We say A is Congruent to B
modulus C, if A divided by C and B divided by C have the
same remainder. C is called the modulus of congruence. It
would be written AB [mod C]
Modulus comes almost unchanged from the Latin from the
diminutive of modus (measure or amount), modulus for a small
measure. Vicky also pointed out that at one time the term
was used for, "A unit of payment used at Trinity College....
Fellows received some number of moduli". Ms Neale also said
she was unfamiliar with the use of the ~ for absolute
difference.
It was Gauss, Disquisitiones arithmeticae in 1801, who
introduced the term modulus of congruence, and the
abreviation, "mod". Cajori credits Jean Argand for the first
use of modulus for the length of a vector in 1814. I am not
sure when the British public schools started to use the term
for the absolute value of a number, and would love to know
if someone has old books with these terms (or others for the
same idea).

Acute is from the Latin word acus for needle, with

derivatives generalizing to anything pointed or sharp. The
root persists in the words acid (sharp taste), acupuncture
(to treat with needles) and acumen (mentally sharp). An
acute angle then, is one which is sharp or pointed. In
mathematics we define an acute angle as one which has a
measure of less than 90o.

The first use of the term in Enlish was in Henry

Billingsley's translation of the Elements of Euclid. "An
acute angle is that, which is lesse then a right angle"; "an
obtuse angle is that which is greater then a right angle" .

Algebra comes from a book written in Arabic that

revolutionized how mathematics was done in western cultures.
"Al-jebr w'al-mugabalah" written by Abu Ja'far Ben Musa
(about 825 AD) who was also known as al-Khowarizmi. He is as
famous among Arabs as Euclid and Aristotle are to the
Western World. He was probably the greatest living
mathematician of his period. The phrase Al-jebr at the start
of the title became the word Algebra in western languages.
The phrase loosly translated means "the reunion of broken
parts". Later, in medieval Europe, "algebrista" was became a
term for the person who set bones (the reunion of broken
parts) and since it was the barbers who did the bonesetting
and blood-letting, they were called an "algebrista".
Abu Ja'far Ben Musa is often mistakenly listed as an Arab
mathematician, but was in fact Persian, and Khowarizmi
refers to the area which was his home. Modern scholars
believe he was born near the Aral sea in what is now
Turkestan. The literal translation of his name means "father
of Jafar and Son of Musa, from Khowarizmi."
The first use of the word "algebra" in English was by the
Welsh mathematician and textbook writer, Robert Recorde in
his Pathway of Knowledge written about 1550.
Abu Ja'far Ben Musa was also the source of the word
algorithm (see below). His book, above, also includes the
first use of what we would today call the quadratic formula;
although his description was verbal and not in modern
mathematical notation.

Algorithm, as it is used in mathematics means a systematic

procedure to solve a problem. The word is derived from the
name of the Persian mathematician, al-Khowarazmi (See
algebra). The first use of the word I am aware of was by G W
Liebniz in the late 1600.

Julio Gonzalez Cabillon posted the notes below in

summarizing earlier posts at Historia Matematica
I checked out the Latin of this Leibniz' first published
account of the calculus [_Acta Eruditorum_, vol. 3, pp. 467473, October 1684], and I certainly find the word
"Algorithmo".
[*] "Nova Methodvs pro maximis et minimis, itemque
tangentibus, quae nec fractas, nec irrationales quantitates
moratur, & singulare pro illis calculi genus, per G.G.L."
(Leibniz's initials in Latin):
On page 469, Leibniz states:
"Ex cognito hoc velut *Algorithmo*, ut ita dicam, calculi
hujus, quem voco *differentialem*, omnes aliae aequationes
differentiales inveniri possunt per calculum communem,
maximae que & minimae, item que tangentes haberi, ita ut
opus non sit tolli fractas aut irrationales, aut alia
vincula, quod tamen faciendum fuit secundum Methodos
hactenus editas."
A few comments:
1. Both terms "Algorithmo" and "differentialem" are
italicised in the original. This must be emphasized, since
either Smith or his editor overlooked this 'petit' detail in
"A Source Book in Mathematics".
2. Please note that in the quoted passage, Leibniz employs
"algorithm" (in the sense of a systematic technique for
solving a problem) with a meaning that may suggest a new
term -- the context, and the italics conveys that
possibility.
3. Apparently, the first English translation of Leibniz'
"Nova Methodvs pro maximis et minimis..." was carried out by
Joseph Raphson in "The Theory of Fluxions, Shewing in a
compedious manner The first Rise of, and various
Improvements made in that Incomparable Method", London,
1715.
Thereby, most probably the earliest printed appearance, in
English, of the term ALGORITHM (in the sense of a systematic
technique for solving a problem) is in that treatise.
Algorithm remained a little known and little used term in

western mathematics until the Russian mathematician Andrei

Markov (1903-????) introduced it. The term became very
popular in the areas of math focused on computing and
computation.

Analogy The word analogy comes from the early Greek roots
ana + logos . Logos was the early Greek root for lots of
related mental constructions such as word, speech, logic,
and reason. An analogy refers to things that share a similar
relation. Originally it was more of a mathematical term
interchangeable with ratio or proportion; as in "2,4,8 is
analogous to 3,6,12". Later this idea of similar relations
was extended to things that shared a logical relationship.
Analog clocks and computers are so named because they
operate off mechanical objects (gears and pulleys) that
transform motions in proportional movements.

Angle comes from the Latin root

with many g sounds the transfer
English languages switched to a
is from the same root. An angle
common endpoint.

angulus, a sharp bend. As

from Latin to the German and
k spelling. The word ankle
is formed by two rays with a

The word Angles for the Germanic tribe that invaded England
in the 5th century, and from which words like Anglo-Saxon
and English are derived, was also drawn from the same root.
"The Angles, says the OED, are the people of Angul "a
district of Holstein, so called from its shape"; it goes on
to say that Angul is the same word as the Old English, Old
Saxon and Old High German angul, a fish-hook - which gives
us the English word angling." [granthutchison, post on
Agora]

Apothem The distance from the center of a regular polygon to

the sides, the apothem, comes from the Greek term "to set
off", as in to set apart. The word is frequently pronounced
"a poth' em' with the accent on the second syllable, but the
traditional, and dictionary pronunciation is with the accent
on the first syllable, "ap' e thum" as in apogee, which

shares the ap root, and means off from the Earth (gee from
geos). Apothem appears to be of modern origin despite its
ancient name, and seems to have first appeared in English in
the mid 1800's
According to Jeff Miller's website on the first use of math
terms:
APOTHEM is found in 1828 in Elements of Geometry and
Trigonometry (1832) by David Brewster (a translation of
Legendre): The radius OT of the inscribed circle is nothing
else than the perpendicular let fall from the centre on one
of the sides: it is sometimes named the apothem of the
polygon.

Are An are is a unit of measure for area equal to 100 square

meters. The word, and the unit of measure, seems to have
been created by the French and derived from the Latin word
area with its current meaning. The are is seldom used today,
but its derivative form, the hectare, is still a common unit
of land measure in some countries.

Arithmetic was the Greek word for number, and is closely

related to the root of reckon, which is becoming an obsolete
term for count (except in some parts of the western and
southern US where they "reckon" almost anything). . . .
(that was a joke folks). In the middle ages the best
mathematicians of Germany were called Reichenmeister and
their arithmetic texts were reichenbucher The beginning of
the word is drawn from the Indo-European root ar which is
related to "fitting together" and gives us words like army,
and art. Order, adorn, and rate all come from variants of
the same root.
The first arithmetic book published in North America was
Sumario compendioso de las quentas de plata y oro que in los
reynos del Piru son necessarias a los mercaderes y todo
genero de tratantes Los algunas reglas tocantes al
Arithmetica. The title translates to "Comprehensive Summary
of the counting of silver and gold, which, in the kingdoms
of Peru, are necessary for merchants and all kinds of
traders". The author was Brother Juan Diez, a priest who

arrived in Mexico with Cortez in 1519. The following is

clipped from an article, THE SUMARIO COMPENDIOSO: THE NEW
WORLD'S FIRST MATHEMATICS BOOK , in the Mathematics Teacher
in February of 2001 by Shirley Gray and C. Edward Sandifer.
The author, Brother Juan Diez, arrived in Mexico with Cortez
in 1519. In 1536, a printing press was set up in Mexico
City, and the following year, it went into operation and was
used for printing religious books. In 1556, the Sumario
became the first book that was not a religious book, and the
twenty-fifth book of any kind, to be published in the New
World.
The publication date of 1556 is remarkable. It was long
before any settlement in Jamestown (1607), Plymouth Colony
(1620), or Quebec City (1608). The New World's first
mathematics book in English was not published until 1703. A
Dutch mathematics book was published in 1730; a German book,
in 1742; a French book, in 1775; a Portuguese one, in 1813;
a Hawaiian one, in 1833; and a mathematics book in Choctaw
in 1835. Of all the colonial mathematics books, the ones in
Spanish are the most interesting because they were mostly
written in America for use by people living in America.
Books from the other colonies were mostly American editions
of European books or else were closely based on European
editions.
According to Bruce Burdick of Roger Williams University,
"The New World's first printed arithmetic (as opposed to a
book, like the Sumario Compendioso, that contains arithmetic
or algebra but whose main theme was something else) was the
Arte para Aprender by Pedro de Paz (Mexico, 1623)." For
those seeking more information about early Spanish math
books in the Americas, Professor Sandifer has an article
about "mathematics books published in the Spanish American
colonies before 1700" and another article on the Breve
Arithmetica on his web page.

Associative The root of the word associative, is the Greek

root for our word social, soci. The first use of the word in
the sense of a mathematical property was probably by W R
Hamilton around 1850.

Association in mathematics refers to changing the grouping

of objects to be operated upon first. Since addition and
multiplication are binary operations (they work with two
numbers at a time) if we wish to add three numbers we have
to choose which two to add first. The associative property
of addition says that in adding 2+4+7, the same result will
occur if we add 2+4 first, and then add the result to 7 as
would occur if we added 4+7 first, and then added 2 + (the
answer to 4+7). Formally the distributive property of
addition is written (A+B)+C= A+(B+C). There is an identical
property for multiplication.

Asymptote The asymptote of a function as it is now used is a

much narrower definition than the original Greek meaning.
The word joins the roots a (not), with sum (together) +
piptein (to fall) and literally means "not falling
together", or not meeting. The word is believed to have been
known to Apollonius of Perga before 200 BC. Originally it
was used for any two curves that did not intersect. Proclus
writes about both asymptotic lines, and symptotic lines
(those that do cross). Now symptotic is almost never heard,
and asymptote is used primarily for straight lines that
serve as a limiting barrier for some curve as one of its
parameters approaches infinity (+/-).
The ~ symbol is often used to indicate that one function is
asymptotic to another. One might write f(x)~ g(x) if the
ratio of f(x) and g(x) approach 1 as x -> infinity.
The pet base of the root piptein gives us words like
petition, petal, petite and propitious.

Average The meaning of average, as it is used in math today,

comes from a commercial practice of the shipping age. The
root, aver, means to declare, and the shippers of goods
would declare the value of their goods. When the goods were
sold, a deduction was made from each persons share, based on
their declared value, for a portion of the loss, their
AVERAGE.

In response to a question about the use of the x-bar

symbol,
, for averge(mean) value of a sample, John Harper
of Victoria University in New Zealand sent a response
including the following information:
<< Does anyone know who introduced the notation 'X-bar'
(i.e. 'X' with a horizontal line above it) for the average
of a sample 'X'? Is it a descendant of the vinculum? >>
R.A. Fisher used that notation, in "On an absolute criterion
for fitting frequency curves Messenger of Mathematics", v.
41: 155-160 (1912) on p.157. (Univ of Adelaide has put
Fisher's collected works on the Web) I don't know if he was
the first. John Harper, School of Mathematical and Computing
Sciences, Victoria University, PO Box 600, Wellington, New
Zealand
Jeff Miller's web page provides some additional material:
for the sample mean. This usage derives from the practice
of applied mathematicians of representing any kind of
average by a bar. J. Clerk Maxwell's "On the Dynamical
Theory of Gases (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society, 157, (1867) p. 64) uses v-bar for the "mean
velocity" of molecules while W. Thomson & P. G. Tait's
Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1879) uses
for the centre
of inertia, wx / x. Karl Pearson, the leading statistician
of the early 20th century, was from such a physics
background. Pearson and his contemporaries used the bar for
sample averages and for expected values but eventually E
for the
replaced it in the latter role. The survival of
sample mean is probably due to the influential example of R.
A. Fisher who used it in all his works from the first, " On
an Absolute Criterion for Fitting Frequency Curves," (1912).

Billion seems to have been a French creation, and was

originally bi-million. The term originally meant 10^12 or
one million millions, and still has this meaning in many
countries today. In the US and some other countries it is
used for 10^9 or one thousand million. The table below
compares the names as used in the US and in Germany:
Value -----German name--------US name
10^6 ----- Million ---------- Million
10^9 ------ Millard------------Billion

10^12 ----- Billion -----------Trillion

10^15------ Billiarde -------- Quadrillion
Cajori attributes the first publication of the words above
million to Nicholas Chuquet. Here is a quote from his A
History of Elementary Mathematics with Hints on Methods of
Teaching:
Their origin dates back almost to the time when the word
million was first used. So far as known, they first occur in
a manuscript work on arithmetic by that gifted French
physician of Lyons, Nicolas Chuquet He employs the words
byllion, tryllion, quadrillion, quyllion, sixlion,
septyllion, octyllion, nonyllion, "et ainsi des aultres se
plus oultre on voulait proceder" to denote the second,
third, etc. powers of a million, i.e. (1,000,000)2,
(1,000,OO0)3, etc. Evidently Chuquet had solved the difficult
question of numeration. The new words used by him appear in
1520 in the printed work of La Roche. Thus the great honour
of having simplified numeration of large numbers appears to
belong to the French. In England and Germany the new
nomenclature was not introduced until about a century and a
half later. In England the words billion, trillion, etc.,
were new when Locke wrote, about 1687. In Germany these new
terms appear for the first time in 1681 in a work by
Heckenberg of Hanover, but they did not come into general
use before the eighteenth century. About the middle of the
seventeenth century it became the custom in France to divide
numbers into periods of three digits, instead of six, and to
assign to the word billion, in place of the old meaning,
(1000,000)2 or 1012, the new meaning of 109
In The Book of Numbers by John Conway and Richard Guy (pp.
14-15) they write
These arithmeticians [Chuquet and de la Roche] used "illion"
after the prefixes
b, tr, quadr, quint, sext, sept, oct and non to denote the
2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th powers of a
million. But around the middle of the 17th century, some
other French arithmeticians used them instead for the
3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th powers of a
thousand. Although condemned by the greatest lexicographers
as "erroneous" (Litr'e) and "an entire perversion of the
original nomenclature of Chuquet and de la Roche" (Murray),
the newer usage is now standard in the U.S., although the
older one survives in Britain and is still standard in the

continental countries (but the French spelling is nowadays

"llon" rather than "llion".
Because of continued conflict with England for the first
fifty years of the new United States existance, it was much
more willing to base the foundation for its numeration
system on the method of the French, who had supported them
in their revolution. In spite of this, "In many textbooks
prior to the War of 1812 (eg. those by Consider and John
Stery 1790, John Vinall 1792, and Johann Ritter 1807) if any
numbers higher than 999,999,999 were discussed, the British
system was used." [for example 1,000,000,000 was onethousand million rather than one-billion ] {from Karen D.
Michalowicz and Arthur C Howard in "Pedagogy in Text", from
the NCTM's A History of School Mathemaitics}

Cardinal numbers are numbers that express amounts, as

opposed to ordinal numbers, which express order or rank. The
term is from the Latin, cardin, for stem or hinge. Cardinal
today means most important or principal, with other things
depending (hinging) on it. The first use appears to have
been by R Percival in 1591,

Cardioid The path of a point on a circle as it rolls around

another circle of the same size is sort of heart shaped and
thus the term is from the Greek root for heart, kardia.

Here is a note on the origin of the term from a post by

Julio Gonzalez Cabillon:
CARDIOID was first used by Giovanni Francesco Mauro Melchior
Salvemini de Castillon in "De curva cardiode" in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1741).
Giovanni Castillon was born on January 15, 1708, in
Castiglione (hence his name), and died on October 11, 1791,
in Berlin. I've taken his dates from Poggendorff's _Bibl.lit. Handwoerterbuch_.
A nice animation of the generation of a cardiod by a circle
rolling upon it is given at the Mathworld page.
The cardiod is a degenerate form of a limacon. The Polar
equation of a limacon is r = b + a Cos(t). If b is smaller
than a then the limacon will have an internal loop. If b is
larger than a, but smaller than 2a, then the limacon will
have a concave "dimple". if b is greater than 2a then the
limacon is convex. When b=a, the shape is a cardiod.

At Jeff Miller's web site on the first use of math words I

found,
The term LIMAON was coined in 1650 by Gilles Persone de
Roberval (1602-1675) (Encyclopaedia Britannica, article:
"Geometry"). It is sometimes called Pascal's limaon, for
tienne Pascal (1588?-1651), the first person to study it.
Boyer (page 395) writes that "on the suggestion of Roberval"
the curve is named for Pascal.

Center The word center comes

kentrus, for a spur or sharp
the center of a circle seems
at a center to fix the spot,
dragged around the center to

to us from a Greek root,

pointed object. The relation to
obvious. A sharp point was made
and a more dull object was
form the circle.

Century Although now used almost exclusively for a period of

one hundred years, century was originally the Latin term for
any collection of one hundred items. In the Roman army a
company consisted of one hundred men, and each was called a
centurion.

Cevian A word created by French geometers around the end of

the 19th century to honor the Italian Giovanni Ceva (1650?1735). A cevian is a line segment from a vertex of a
triangle to a point on the opposite side. The median,
altitude, and angle bisector are all examples of cevians.
The perpendicular bisector, in most cases, is not a cevian
because it does not pass through a vertex of the triangle.
Note that a cevian, may cut the opposite side outside the
triangle.
Julio Gonzalez Cabillon wrote, "the French word CEVIENNE,
which was proposed by Professor A. Poulain (Faculte
catholique d'Angers, France) in 1888. Naturally, he derived
the word from the surname of the Italian mathematician
Giovanni Ceva (1647?-1734)."

Chaos Although the ideas of chaos theory as we know it today

have been actively studied at some level for most of the
20th century, the word as a mathematical term dates only
from an article in American Mathematical Monthly in 1975,
"Period Three Implies Chaos". The Greek root khaox was for
an empty space. This meaning still persists in archaic usage
where it refers to a canyon or abyss. The evolution of the
word to mean disorder seems to come from reference to the
time before God created the universe. The empty space was
with out order and the creation filled the emptiness and
created order.
A more common form of the word exists today, but few people
are aware of the connection. At the start of the 17th
century, a Flemish scientist named Jan Baptist van Helmont
was studying the bubbles that rise when fruit juice was
allowed to stand. These strange vapors, without shape or
form, reminded him of the Greek idea of Chaos, so he called

them by the Germanic (Flemish is a dialect of German)

spelling of chaos, gas.
The physical objects formed out of the void were called the
cosmos, the Greeks word for orderly or well formed. Today we
often hear people refer to the Universe as the cosmos. When
Robert Milliken, the American physicist, sought a term for
the radiation that seemed to be coming from everywhere in
the universe (the cosmos) he suggested the name Cosmic Rays
. Today the word cosmos also remains as the root of words
like cosmopolitan and cosmetics.

Chi Square The statistical test, and the name for it are
both credited to Karl Pearson around the year 1900. The
actual distribution now called the Chi-Square distribution
was discovered earlier by Helment
The Chi_Square test is often used to assess the "goodness of
fit" between an obtained set of frequencies in a random
sample and what is expected under a given statistical
hypothesis.
The distribution is named for the letter Chi,, the 22nd
letter of the Greek alphabet.

Chord The Greek root of the chord, chorde, means gut or

string. The musical use of the term comes from a contraction
of accord, two strings played together.

Circle The Latin root of the word circle is circus. The

traditional shape of the large roofless enclosures in which
the famous Roman Chariot races were run was circular or
oblong, and thus the word came to described this shape as
well.

Congruent The Latin word congruere meant "coming together"

or "working together". I learned from Glen Woodburn recently
that, "Actually, gruere comes from the latin word grui which
means to be in harmony with. So congruent translates to mean
together in harmony with." Whether applied to a geometric
shape, or a military unit, it meant that all the parts fit
together. According to a message from Nathan Sidoli, in
Euclid's Elements the "word that Heath translates as
"coincides" is *efarmo^zein* - to fit exactly"
. Nathan refers to Common Notion 4 in Book
one, which Heath translates as "Things which coincide with
one another, are equal to one another."
During the 16th century translations of Euclid into Latin
began to use the Latin term for Common Notion 4. In a note
to the Math Hisotry list J. Cabilon wrote that "Christoph
Clavius (1537?-1612) wrote: '...Hinc enim fit, ut aequalitas
angulorum ejusdem generis requirat eandem inclinationem
linearum, ita ut lineae unius conveniant omnino lineis
alterius, si unus alteri superponatur. Ea enim aequalia
sunt, quae sibi mutuo congruunt.' (vol. I, p. 363)"[emphasis
added]
At Jeff Miller's web site there are several notes on the
development of the term congruence. In particular he says
that, "In English, writers commonly refer to geometric
figures as equal as recently as the nineteenth century. In
1828, Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry (1832) by David
Brewster (a translation of Legendre) has:
Two triangles are equal, when an angle and the two sides
which contain it, in the one, are respectively equal to an
angle and the two sides which contain it, in the other."
The modern symbol for congruence common to most US high
school texts, which combines the tilde ~ above an equal
sign, =, was first used by many writers for similarity as
well. It is sometimes used with the wave inverted also.
Leibniz used a tilde with a single underline
as a unique
symbol for congruence, but so many symbols were in use that
it did not catch on. According to Cajori, the use of the
modern symbol for congruence became the accepted practice
around the beginning of the 20th century. He suggests the
first use was by G. A. Hill and George B Halstead. The
symbol is still not universally accepted and was not used in
England at the time of his writing because of confusion with
the tilde symbols use for difference.

I recently (Feb, 2004) posted a request for information to

the Historia Matematica discussion group and received the
following update on the use of the ~ symbol in England, and
the related question of a symbol for congruence. According
to a post from Herbert Prinz,
"In modern English texts on navigation, nautical astronomy
or its history, the tilde is frequently used to express the
function | a - b |, where |x| stands for absolute value. E.
g. Cotter, The Complete Nautical Astronomer, 1969. I am not
sure when this practice started. In older texts on the same
subject, say, Moore, The Practical Navigator, 1800, one does
not find the tilde used in this way. For one, because
instructions were given mostly verbally without the use of
any symbols at all. And second, the distinction from '-' was
unnecessary, as it was always understood, if not explicitly
stated, that one must subtract the smaller from the larger
value."
.
Tony Mann pointed out that in England the symbol was,
"commonly used for 'is isomorphic to', and is used
colloquially for 'is essentially equivalent to'." John
Harper of Victoria University in New Zealand added that,
"Geometric congruence was indicated by 3 parallel equal
lines: , an equals sign with a straight underline. It still
is, according to Borowski & Borwein "Collins Dictionary of
Mathematics" (HarperCollins, Great Britain 1989) who give ~
on top of = only for approximate equality." Cajori credits
the creation of the symbol for geometric congruence to
Reimann and was used by Bolyai.
Gauss used
to numbers
example 12
divided by

the term congruent in modular arithmetic to refer

which had the same remainder upon divison, for
7 mod 5 since each has a remainder of two when
five.

Congruent Numbers was a brand new term to me when I read a

neat blog at Bit-Player about it after a recent news release
from AIM (American Institute of Mathematics) announced that
all the congruent numbers up to 1 trillion have been
enumerated. Well, job done I guess. The blog is so well
written that I am not about to try to replicate all that

good work, go read it. If you want more, here is a link from
the AIM on the topic.

Conjugate is the union of the common Latin prefix com

(together) and the root juge (yoke) and means to bind
together in a pair. Mathematically it is often used for
things that are opposites in some way, as in the complex
conjugates. The same word in grammar refers to words of a
common origin and related meaning, and in biology to an act
of sexual union, for which the more common term is conjugal
relations.

Converse is from the Latin roots com(great or intense) +

vertere (to turn). The literal meaning is "to turn away".
The verb converse (as in conversation), which has the same
spelling, is from a completely different root.

Dean The term now used for the head of a department or

faculty at a college is derived from the Latin deaconus
which meant "chief of ten". The similar sounding deacon, for
a church leader, is not related and comes from the Greek
root diakonos for a servant. According to John Conway, the
literal meaning is "one who raises the dust".
The Online Etymology Dictionary indicates that doyen comes
from the same term... "doyen 1422, from M.Fr. doyen
"commander of ten," from O.Fr. deien (see dean).

Diagonal comes from the Greek roots dia( to pass through or

join) + gonus [angle] and describes the line segment which
passes from the vertex of one angle to another in a polygon.
The word diagonal was probably first used in a geometric
sense by Heron of Alexandria.

Diagram joins the roots dia(to pass through or join) with

gram (written or drawn and earlier carved). It literally
means "that which is marked out", as by the crossing of two
lines. This leads me to wonder how old the expression, "X
marks the spot", could be.

Divide shares its major root with the word widow. The root
vidua refers to a separation. In widow the meaning is
obvious, one who is separated from the spouse. A similar
version of the word was often meant to describe the feeling
of bereavement that a widow would feel. The prefix, di, of
divide is a contraction of dis, a two based word meaning
apart or away, as in the process of division in which equal
parts are separated from each other. Notice that the vi part
of vidua is also derived from a two word, and is the same
root as in vigesimal (two tens), for things related to
twenty. An individual is one who can not be divided.
In a division problem such as 24 / 6 = 4 the number being
divided, in this case the 24, is called the dividend and the
number that is being used to divide it, the 6, is called the
divisor. The four is called the quotient. If the quotient is
not a factor of the dividend, then some quantity will remain
after division. This quantity is usually called the
remainder, although residue sometimes is used. The Treviso
Arithmetic uses the word lauanzo for remainder. In Frank
Swetz's book, Capitalism and Arithmetic he gives, "The term
lauanzo apparently evolved from l'avenzo, meaning a surplus,
or in a business context, a profit." Swetz also points out
that in the 15th Century the term partition (partire in
Latin) was synonymous with the word divisision
In today's schools almost every grade school student learns
to divide, so students may be surprised to learn that in the
16th century schools Division was only taught in the
University. One of the first arithmetics for the general
public that treated the subject of division was Rechenung
nach der lenge, auff den Linihen vnd Feder by Adam Riese.
Here is how the Math History page at St Andrews University
in Scotland described it,

"It was published in 1550 and was a textbook written for

everyone, not just for scientists and engineers. The book
contains addition, subtraction, multiplication and, very
surprisingly for that period, also division. At that time
division could only be learnt at the University of Altdorf
(near Nrnberg) and even most scientists did not know how to
divide; so it is astonishing that Ries explained it in a
textbook designed for everyone to use."
I think it is even more astonishing that the sitution
described still existed in 1550 in Germany. Perhaps the
earliest "arithmetic" to provide instruction in the local
vernacular of the common people was the 1478 "Treviso
Arithmetic", so named because it was printed in the city of
Treviso (the author is unknown) just north of Venice. Frank
J Swetz writes about the situation in Capitalism and
Arithmetic (pg 10):
From the fourteenth century on, merchants from the north
travelled to Italy, particularly to Venice, to learn the
arte de mercadanta, the mercantile art, of the Italians.
Sons of German businessman flocked to Venice to study...
Early algorithms for division: By the middle ages there seem
to have been five approaches to the process of division.
The first was called the Galley, galea, or Scratch method.
This method was efficient in a period of expensive paper and
quill pens since it required less figures than other
methods. Even the modern long division method requires more
figures. The name Galley was used because the resulting
pattern after the division left a picture that seemed to
remind the early reckoning masters of the shape of a ship at
sail. The term scratch has to do with the crossing out of
values to be replaced with new ones in the process. The ease
with which this could be done on a sand board or counting
board made it a popular approach in the cultures of the
East, and the method is believed to come from the early
Hindu or Chinese. For example, Cajori writes, "It will be
remembered that the scratch method did not spring into
existence in the form taught by the writers of the sixteenth
century. On the contrary, it is simply the graphical
representation of the method employed by the Hindus, who
calculated with a coarse pencil on a small dust-covered
tablet. The erasing of a figure by the Hindus is here
represented by the scratching of a figure." He also comments
on the popularity of this method, " For a long time the
galley or scratch method was used almost to the entire
exclusion of the other methods. As late as the seventeenth

century it was preferred to the one now in vogue. It was

adopted in Spain, Germany, and England. It is found in the
works of Tonstall, Kecorde, Stifel, Stevin, Wallis, Napier,
and Oughtred. Not until the beginning of the eighteenth
century was it superseded in England. "
Here is an image comparing how the galley method works shown
beside the current US Model for long division, which the
Italians called a danda. The page the image is from has a
nice step by step illustration of the process. I have
recently (2005) acquired a German student "copy book" from
1804 which seems to show the Galley division method and the
student's illustration of the ship around the work. (below
right)

A second method that was sometimes taught was the process of

repeated subtraction. The image below shows an example from
a popular Arithmetic in the US by Charles Davies, published
in 1833. I have seen this method in an English textbook as
late as 1961 (Public School Arithmetic by Baker and Bourne).
It also appears in a 1932 US publication of Practical
Arithmetic, by George H. Van Tuyl, and perhaps in others

A third method was called per repiego by parts, which I have

seen in books into the 20th century. In this method a
division was accomplished by breaking the divisor into its
factors, and then dividing the dividend by one of the
factors, and sequentially dividing the resulting quotient by
each remaining factor in turn to get a final quotient. The
problem below is modeled on a problem in the 1919 copyright
A School Arithmetic, by Hall and Stevens.
divide 92467 by 168 or 4 x 6 x 7
4|92467
6|23116 . groups of four and 3 units over
7| 3852 .. groups of 24 (4x6) and 4 foursover
___550 groups of 168 and 2 twenty-fours over
The complete remainder is 2 (24) + 4(4) + 3 = 67
This method was presented in Liber Abaci, by Fibonacci in
1202. After introducing how to divide by numbers of one
digit, and then larger primes, he develops a set of
"Composition Rules" for numbers with more than one digit. A

composed fraction might look like

. Fibonacci used
the Arabic method of writing fractions from right to left,
and this composed fraction would be read as 4/5 + 2/25 +
1/75; or in modern notation, 67/75 with each part of the
numerator being read over the product of all the
denominators below or to the right.
The "composition" of 75 would be a fraction with 1 0 0 and 3
5 5 in the denominator, the fraction 1/75. When he divides
749 by 75, he first uses only the first denominator, 3. The
quotient of 749 by three is 249 with a remainder of 2. The 2
is placed as a numerator over the three, and the 249 is
divided by the second number in the denominator (a five).
249 divided by 5 gives 49 with a remainder of four. This
remainder, 4, is placed as a second number in the numerator
over the five in the denominator. Now the 49 is divided by

the final number in the denominator (another five) and the

quotient is 9 with another remainder of four. This four is
placed over the final five and the nine is placed to the
right as the quotient. Fibonacci then gives the answer of

749 divided by 75 as
4/25 + 2/75 or 9 74/75.

which would be 9 and 4/5 +

A fourth method, which is similar to what we would now

called short division except that the student used a table
of division or multiplication facts. The method was called
per colona, by the column, or per tavoletta by the table, in
reference to the table of facts used. An example of this
method is shown below from another popular American
arithmetic by Nicholas Pike, from 1826. The use of tables to
aid in multiplication and division were a common practice
from the 1400s up to the early 20th century.

The fifth is the true ancestor of the method most used for
long division in schools today, and was called a danda, "by
giving". In his Capitalism and Arithmetic, Frank J Swetz
gives The rationale for this term was explained by Cataneo
(1546), who noted that during the division process, after
each subtraction of partial products, another figure from
the dividend is given to the remainder. He also says that
the first appearance in print of this method was in an
arithmetic book by Calandri in 1491. The method was
frequently called the Italian method even into the 20th
century (Public School Arithmetic, by Baker and Bourne,
1961) although sometimes the term Italian method was used
to describe a form of long division in which the partial
products are omitted by doing the multiplication and
subtraction in one step. The image below shows a typical
long division problem with the partial products crossed out
and the resulting "Italian method" on the right.

The early uses of this method tend to have the divisor on

one side of the dividend, and the quotient on the other as
the work is finished, as shown in the image below taken from
the 1822 The Common School Arithmetic : prepared for the use
of academies and common schools in the United States by
Charles Davies. Swetz suggests that it remained on the right
by custom after the galley method gave way to the Italian
method in the 17th century. It was only the advent of
decimal division, he says, and the greater need for
alignment of decimal places, that the quotient was moved to
above the number to be divided.

In a recent Greasham College lecture by Robin Wilson at

Barnard's Inn Hall in London, he credited the invention of
the modern long division process to Briggs, "The first
Gresham Professor of Geometry, in early 1597, was Henry
Briggs, who invented the method of long division that we all
learnt at school."
I recently found a site called The Algorithm Collection
Project. where the authors have tried to collect the long
division process as used by different cultures around the
world. Very few of the ones I saw actually put the quotient
on top as American students are usually taught. In one
interesting note, a respondent from Norway showed one
method, then explained that s/he had been taught another
way, and then demonstrates the common American algorithm,
but adds a note that says, but no one is using this
algorithm in Norway anymore. I might point out that the
colon, ":" seems to be the division symbol of choice if this
sample can be generalized as it was used in Norway, Germany,
Italy, and Denmark. The Spanish example uses the obelisk,
and the other three use a modification of the "a danda" long
division process. The method labled "Catalan" is like the
"Italian Method" shown above where the partial products are
omitted. (More about division symbols at Symbols of Division

Dozen The word dozen is a contraction of the Latin Duodecim

(two + ten). This root also appears in dodecagon (from
duodecagon) and duodenum, the first part of the intestine

that is about twelve inches long. Some math and language

historians think that a dozen is one of the earliest
primitive groupings, perhaps because there are approximately
a dozen cycles of the moon in a cycle of the sun. It appears
to be the basis of many larger values that were developed by
many cultures. A shock was 60, or five dozen (a dozen for
each finger on one hand) and many cultures had a "great
hundred" [see hundred] of 120 or ten dozen (a dozen for each
finger on both hands). The Romans used a fraction system
based on 12 and the smallest part, an uncil became our word
for an ounce. Charlemagne established a monetary system that
had a base of twelve and twenty and the remnants persist in
many places. In English money today 100 pence equals a
Pound, but only a few short years ago a Pound was divided
into 20 shillings of 12 pence each.

First is a native English word from the Old English fyrst

which was a variant of fore (front)

Fraction comes from the Latin word frangere, to break. A

fraction, then, originally represented the broken portion of
some whole. The first known use of the word in English is by
Geoffrey Chaucer in 1391 in the work, A Treatise on the
Astrolabe.
By the middle of the 19th Century fraction was used to
describe parts larger than the whole as well. In the 1876
edition of Davies' Practical Arithmetic he lists as Article
114. "There are six kinds of fractions:" He then goes on to
define
"1. A Proper Fraction is one whose numerator is less than
the denominator"
"2. An Improper Fraction is one whose numerator is equal to,
or exceeds the denominator."
"3. A Simple Fraction is one whose numerator and denominator
are both whole numbers." (Note this is not necessarily what
modern teachers would call in "simplest form", for example
8/4 is a simple fraction)
"4. A Compound Fraction is a fraction of a fraction or
several fractions connected by the word of or x. The

following are compound fractions: 1/2 of 1/4, 1/3 of 1/3 of

1/3, 1/7 x 1/3 x 4."
"5. A Mixed Number is a number expressed by an integer and a
fraction."
"6. A Complex Fraction is one whose numerator or denominator
is fractional; or, in which both are fractional," In the
Fourth Yearbook of the NCTM in 1929 one of the curriculum
changes listed for the State of New York included in the
list for the 1910 syllabus, "Fractions, including complex
fractions of the 'apartment house' type." (page 161) I
assume the "mixed number over a mixed number" is the type of
problem referred to, but am still trying to find
confirmation of this.
Many modern elementary teachers get upset by the use of the
term "reduce a fraction". I think this is mostly because
they are not familiar with the origin of the term and only
understand the word "reduce" to mean "make smaller", which
is certainly one of the most common definitions of the word
in modern dictionaries. I hope the the following will make
them more understanding of those of us who are VERY old, and
still remember when the term had a broader meaning.
According to the OED, the first use of the term in the sense
of reducing a fraction was in 1579 in a book by Thomas
Digges. Reduction is defined in the 1850 edition of
Frederick Emerson's North American Arithmetic, Part Third,
for Advanced Scholars as "the operation of changing any
quantity from its number in one denomination to its number
in another denomination."(pg 29, see image here) On the
following page it asks the student to "reduce 7 bushels and
6 quarts to pints.". Later in the section on fractions it
defines, "Reduction of fractions consists in changing them
from one form to another, without altering their value."
This broader language is preserved in most later texts for
the next seventy or so years. It is defined in Milne's
Progressive Arithmetic (1906, William J Milne) thusly, "The
process of changing the form of any number without changing
its value is called reduction." An almost identical
definition appears in Davies and Peck's 1877 Complete
Arithmetic, Theoretical and Practical(page 84, art. 66). All
the books include reduction of fractions to higher terms as
well as lower terms, and reduction of "decimals to common
fractions".
In the Late 1930's and 40's arithmetic textbooks seemed to
have totally omitted the broader definition, and treat

reduce as a vade mecam for fractions in "lowest terms" or

"simplest terms". In Learning Arithmetic (6) by Lennes,
Rogers and Traver, (1942) the term reduction appears in the
index only as a subheading under "fractions". The first
occurance in the text, on page 36, without prior definition
introduces students to a set of problems with the
directions, "Reduce the fractions below to simplest forms".
In Making Sure of Arithmetic by Silver Burdett (1955) the
word "reduce" does not appear in the index at all, but on
page 8 it contains, "When the two terms of a fraction are
divided by the same number until there is no number by which
both terms can be divided evenly, the fraction is reduced to
lowest terms." [emphasis is from text]. By 1964, The
Universal Encyclopedia of Mathematics by Simon and Schuster
contains "A fraction is reduced, or cancelled, by dividing
numerator and denominator by the same number." (pg 364)
Later on the same page they note, "a fraction cannot be
reduced if numerator and denominator are mutually prime"
indicating that when they said "the same number" in the
first statement, they meant a positive integer. This
definition leads to "reduction" of fractions as making the
numerator and denominator both smaller.
The roots of the word reduce are from the Latin re for back
or again, and dicere which means "to lead". The latter root
is also found in the word educare which is literally, to
lead out, and is the source of our modern English word,
educate.

Frustum (sometimes spelled frustrum) is from the

Latin and means "a piece broken off". Mathematically
it usually refers to a part of a solid cut off
between two parallel planes, as opposed to
truncated. The Indo-European root of frustum is bhreus and
is related to cutting, crushing, or pounding. Related words
from the same root are fragment, bruise, and possibly brush
(from a bundle of cut twigs).
Jeff Miller's web site on the earliest use of math words
includes a note on how frequently the term is misspelled as
"frustrum".
"This word is commonly misspelled as "frustrum" in, for
example, Samuel Johnson's abridged 1843 Edition of his

dictionary. The word is spelled correctly in the "Frustum"

entry and the "Hydrography" entry in the 1857 Mathematical
Dictionary and Cyclopedia of Mathematical Science, but it is
misspelled in the entry "Altitude of a Frustrum." The word
is misspelled in the 1962 Crescent Dictionary of Mathematics
and remains misspelled in the 1989 Webster's New World
Dictionary of Mathematics, which is a revision of the
Crescent dictionary. The word is also misspelled in at least
three places in The History of Mathematics: An Introduction
(1988) by David M. Burton.
This has become so common it may almost be considered an
alternative spelling. He also has, of course, a notation on
the first use of the term in English, "FRUSTUM first appears
in English in 1658 in The Garden of Cyrus or the Quincuncial
Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancients ...
Considered by Sir Thomas Brown: "In the parts thereof
[plants] we finde..frustums of Archimedes" (OED2)."

Geometry is derived from the conjunction of the Greek word

for the Earth, Geos, and the term for "to measure", metros.
Literally then, Geometry means "to measure the Earth".
According to the Greek legends the first things created out
of the "chaos" were the earth, Gaia and the sky, Ouranos
(which would become Uranus in Latin). The Greek word Gaia
was a name not only for the earth, but for the goddess of
the Earth. Although the Greeks and the Latins pronounced the
word Gay' yuh it came into English pronounced more like Jee'
uh from which we get the many Geos rooted words such as
geography and geology.
I recently read a post by G.L.Narasimham to a geometry
discussion list that pointed out that the common term in
some Indian dialects, was very closly related
A commercial (advertisement for onion soup spice, CBR Masala
) in Hindu newspaper in India a couple of years ago
mentioned origin of the word Geometry.As it is intersting, I
reproduce it below, not verbatim:
--Geometry ( Jyo-Miti)
Kalpasutra is an important source of Vedic mathematics. The
sections called sulba-sutras deal with measurement and
construction of such Yagna-vedis (platform for religious
rites) that involved geometrical propositions and problems

related to geometrical figures. The word sulba means a cord,

rope, filament or string and the word root means
'measuring'. It is interesting to note that among the
Egyptians, geometry of surveying was considered to be the
science of rope structures (harpendona 'ptae) !! .. They
thus appear to be the Egyptian counterparts of Indian
sulbavids.
Some 50 years ago text books on geometry in Tamil language
were entitled 'Jyomiti Ganitam' The word geometry owes its
origin to India, Jya=Earth. Miti = Measure. Hence 'Jyamit'
meaning measurement of earth or figures drawn on earth, gave
rise to the present term geometry.
Courtesy Dr. V.S. Narasimhan, Chennai. 'A Concise History of
Science of India', Indian National Science Academy, pp
139,149.
------Just as the study of the Earth, Geology, recalls the ancient
Greek goddess of the earth, the term Uranology is the study
of the sky, but the more common term today is astronomy. But
do not despair for the lost memory of the Greek god of the
sky, for he is preserved in the name of the planet
discovered in 1781 by William Herschel. Herschel thought he
had discovered a comet and published the result for the
Royal Society. Although Herschel wanted to name the planet
for King George III, remembered as the bad guy in the
American revolution by U.S. History; Johann Bode (see Bode's
Law) came up with the suggestion for the name that stuck,
Uranus. Hershcell continued to call the planet Georgium
Sidus, the Georgian Star after his royal patron.
Uranus, the sky god, is also remembered through a discovery
a few years later (1798) by chemist Martin Klaproth. It was
a tradition of chemists to name metals after planets, so
Klaproth named his new metal after the new planet, calling
it Uranium. Strangely, he later discovered another new metal
and decided to name it after the earth, but instead of using
the Greek goddess of earth, he chose the Roman equivalent
and called his new metal, tellurium. The Roman goddess of
the earth was known by two names. The first was terra, which
gives us words like terrestrial, and its better known
opposite, extra-terrestrial. The other was tellus, which is
almost non-existent today, except in the name of Klaproth's
metallic discovery.

Googol A number invented by Milton Sirotta, the eight year

old nephew of Dr Edward Kasner, when asked to think of a
name for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. 10^100 is an incredibly
large number. The largest reasonable estimates for the
number of particles in the universe is only about 10^85. A
googol is a million times a billion times this much.
I've been asked so many times that I finally tracked down
the answer to "Whatever happened to Milton Sirotta?" From
his obituary, it seems he died in 1980, I also found a note
that said, "Edwin(his brother) and Milton worked for most of
their lives in their father's factory in Brooklyn, NY,
pulverizing apricot pits into an abrasive used for
industrial purposes".

Hectare A unit of land equal to 100 ares or about 2.47

acres. An are is the area of a square with sides of a
dekameter (ten meters). A hectare is equal to a square made
up of a ten by ten array of ares or, in more modern words, a
square with sides of 100 meters. The prefix hecto is from
the Greek word for one hundred, hekaton. The prefix is
common in units of measure, such as hectogram or hectometer.

Helix is preserved from the Greek and has maintained its

meaning since antiquity. The Greek word seems to have been
used generally to apply to ideas about wrapping or twisting,
but only its mathematical meaning seems to have survived.

Histogram The root of histogram is probably from the Greek

root histo, for tissue, and gram, for write or draw. The
suffixes gram and graph are almost interchangeable, and both
have to do with the act of writing or drawing. Karl Pearson,
the first known user, apparently thought of each vertical
bar as a cell. Some have suggested that the root is from the
word "history" since a histogram provides a record, and
certainly Pearson knew of this meaning also.

In a recent post to a math history news group, John Aldrich

of the Department of Economics of the University of
Southampton wrote:
I do not know the history of the technique but the _term_
histogram was coined by Karl Pearson to refer to a "common
form of graphical representation".
The _OED_ quotes from _Philos. Trans. R. Soc._ A. CLXXXVI,
(1895) 399 [Note. The word "histogram" was] introduced by
the writer in his lectures on statistics as a term for a
common form of graphical representation, i.e., by columns
marking as areas the frequency corresponding to the range of
their base.
Stigler (_History of Statistics_) identifies the lectures as
the 1892 lectures on the geometry of statistics.
The Greek root of history is from histor, a learned man. The
implication is that a learned man is aware of history, but
it is more direct than just good advice. The Indo-European
root of the word is the same root that gives us wise.

Hour and year are both derived from the Greek root horo,
which was applied to ideas about time and the seasons. In
the Old Germanic horo became yero and year was thus derived
from the same root which gave us hour. Today horoscope
refers to fortune telling, but the practice is rooted in the
original meaning, measuring the aspect of the stars and
planets to measure the seasons. Horology is still the name
for a maker of timepieces.

Hundred is from the German root hundt. The quantity that it

represents has not been consistent over the years and has
ranged from its present value, 100, to 112, 120, 124, and
132 at different times in different areas. The remnants of
these old measures still persist in the hundredweight of
some countries representing 112 or 120 pounds, depending on
the country. A hundred has also been used to represent an
area of land equal to 100 hides (of cattle?). The measure of
area was frequently used in colonial US, and parts of
England in place of "Shire" or "Ward". A curious custom
related to one hundred as a unit of land occurs in England
when a member of the House of Commons wishes to resign his
seat, which is illegal. An MP accepts stewardship of the

"Chiltern Hundreds", an area of chalk hills near Oxford and

Buckingham, and effects his release from Parliament.

Hypotenuse comes from the common Greek root hypo(for under,

as in hypodermic -under the skin) and the less common tein
or ten, for stretch. This last is the source of our modern
word tension. The hypotenuse was the line segment "stretched
under" the right angle.
The other two sides of a right triangle are generally called
legs, but the term is also applied to any side of a triangle
with the idea that they are standing upon a "base". The
term, leg, is also applied to either of the two parts on
each side of the vertex of a curve such as a parabola or
hyperbola. More formally, I have recently seen the term
cathetus used to describe the two non-hypotenuse sides of a
right triangle. Cathetus actually means a straight line
falling perpendicularly on another straight line or surface,
and was used by Euclid in this fashion in his tenth
definition in the first book of The Elements

When a straight line standing on a straight line makes the

adjacent angles equal to one another, each of the equal
angles is right, and the straight line standing on the other
is called a perpendicular to that on which it stands.
is "to let
The literal meaning of the Greek root
down". The medical term cathetor, and the electrical term
cathode both come from the same root.
At Jeff Miller's website I found :
Cathetus occurs in English in 1571 in A Geometricall
Practise named Pantometria by Thomas Digges (1546?-1595)
(although it is spelled Kathetus).
Cathetus is found in English in the Appendix to the 1618
edition of Edward Wright's translation of Napier's
Descriptio. The writer of the Appendix is anonymous, but may
have been Oughtred.

[[My thanks to Steve Earth, math teacher at the Kehillah

Jewish High School, for suggesting this term]]

Isosceles is the union of the Greek iso (same or equal) and

skelos (legs) and refers to two sides of a object as being
the same length, as in isosceles triangles and isosceles
trapezoids. The root iso shows up in many scientific and
mathematical words such as isometry (same measure), and
isomorphic (same shape). Isobar is used both in chemistry
(two atoms with equal atomic weight) and in meteorology
(lines connecting points of equal
barometric pressure). The two
equal length sides are called
legs (see above), and the other
side is called the base.
I recently (2009) became aware
that the term "arms" is sometimes
used instead of legs. Here is a
link to a

January The first month of the

year was originally a period of
festival between the end of one
year and the beginning of the
next in honor of the Roman god
Janus. Janus was the god of
beginnings and endings and is portrayed with two faces, one
looking forward and one looking back.

Logarithm is the combination of two Greek roots,

Logos(reason or ratio) + artihmus(number). The ratio refers
to the original method of constructing logarithms by
geometric sequences. The name was introduced by John Napier
(1550-1617), the inventor of logarithms, in his 1614 work on
logarithms, Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio,
[Description of the wonderful canon of logarithms .... but
it is usually called "The Descripto"]. It was originally

written in Latin and subsequently translated into English.

Here is a site where you can find a digital copy of the
English text
It seems that Pietro Mengoli (1625-1686) was the first to
use the term "natural logarithm". Boyer writes, "Mercator
took over from Mengoli the name 'natural logarithm' for
values that are derived by means of this series." The term
Mengoli and Mercator actually used was "logarithmus
naturalis". In a discussion group, Jeff Miller suggested
that it might be this use of noun before adjective that
prompted the use of the symbol "ln" for natural log rather
than "nl". According to Cajori, the symbol "ln" was first
used for the natural logarithm (log base e) in 1893 by
Irving Stringham (1847-1909). Stringham introduces the
notation without comment in a list of symbols following the
table of contents, then uses it for the first time on page
41, shown below.

Thanks to Dave Renfro for help in getting this digital pic.

I also recently heard in a correspondence from George
Zeliger that when he was a student in Russia (around 1989)
it was common to use "lg" for the common logarithm (log base
ten).
When Napier constructed his tables he used a base that was
slightly smaller than one (1-10-7) and so as the number, n,
got bigger, the logarithm, l, got smaller. It was common at
the time in trigonometry tables to divide the radius of a
circle into 10,000,000 parts. Because the main intention of
his creation was focused on addressing the difficulty in
performing trigonometric computations, Napier also divided
his basic unit into 107 parts. Then to avoid having to use
fractions, he multiplied each value by 107. In notation of
today's mathematics, the form of Napier's logs would look
like :
107 (1-10-7)L=N. Then L is the Naperian logarithm of N.

According to e: The Story of a Number by Eli Maor,

In the second edition of Edward Wright's translation of
Napier's Descripto (London, 1618), in an appendix probably
written by William Oughtred, there appears the equivalent of
the statement that loge10 = 2.302585.
Since the actual tables contains no decimals it was probably
given as 2302585 without the decimal point.
In a famous meeting between Napier and Henry Briggs, Briggs
suggested the use of a base of 10 instead of 1- 10-7 and to
have the logarithm of one equal to zero. This Napier agreed
to but the task of constructing tables of "common"
logarithms fell to Briggs, and they were often called
Brigg's Logarithms in his honor.
Robin Wilson, in his Gresham College lecture on the number
e, that "Early ideas of logarithms are given in works of
Chuquet and Stifel around the year 1500. They listed the
first few powers of 2 and noticed that to multiply any two
of them it is enough to add their exponents." Maor notes
that Joost Burgi of Switzerland probably created a table of
logarithms before Napier by several years, but did not
publish until later, and he is almost forgotten today. Burgi
may also have independently discovered the method of
Prosthaphaeresis and gave it to Tycho Brahe. Burgi is also
remembered as the person who taught Kepler Algebra.
The impact of logartihms on the working scientist of the
period is hard to appreciate, but one may get an idea from
this quote by Pierre Laplace, "Logarithms, by shortening the
labors, doubled the life of the astronomer." While it is
Napier's work on logartihms that he is remembered for today,
in his own time he was famous for the calculating method
called Napiers rods and a method of calculating spherical
right triangle trigonometry. He thought his most important
work had been published 21 years earlier in 1593. In that
year he published a mathematical analysis of the book of
Revelations in the Bible, A Plaine Discovery of the Whole
Revelation of Saint John. In the book he revealed that the
Pope was the antichrist, and that the world would end in the
year 1786. Fortunately for us, he was wrong on at least that
one point. To his credit, he more accurately predicted the
development of the machine gun, the submarine, and the tank.

Gordon Fisher recently posted a time line of the development

of the use of the abbreviation "log" for lograrithms. Here
is his post with a few notes thrown in
Log. (with a period, capital "L") was used by Johannes
Kepler (1571-1630) in 1624 in Chilias logarithmorum (Cajori
vol. 2, page 105)
log. (with a period, lower case "l") was used by Bonaventura
Cavalieri (1598-1647) in Directorium generale Vranometricum
in 1632 (Cajori vol. 2, page 106).
log (without a period, lower case "l") appears in the 1647
edition of Clavis mathematicae by William Oughtred (15741660) (Cajori vol. 1, page 193).
Kline (page 378) says Leibniz introduced the notation log x
(showing no period), but he does not give a source.
loga was introduced by Edmund Gunter (1581-1626) according to
an Internet source. [I do not see a reference for this in
Cajori.]
Many students (and teachers) have heard colorful legends
about the reasoning behind the use of "ln" for the natural
logarithm (from the French for something, or something about
the name Napier). Most of them seem to me to be more myth
than fact. The facts, as best I know them, is that the first
use of the terms "natural" and "logarithm" together was by
Nicholas Mercator (not the cartographer) in 1668 in his
logarithmo technica in which he used the Latinized "log
naturalis". [[[In early 2005 a post from Jeff Miller pointed
out that, according to Carl Boyer, Pietro Mengoli used the
term before Mercator. Both were working with values derived
from a series, Mercator with the expansion of log(1+x)]]]
The first use of "ln" as a symbol was, as Gordon points
out(below), by Stringham (I have not seen this book and do
not know if he gives an explanation). As to the correct
pronunciation of "ln(x)", whatever your teacher says is
correct, but high school students should be aware that many
college mathematicians find the symbol disturbing. In his
1984 biography, Paul Halmos described the symbol as
"childish". It is, however, very commonly used in computer
science.
ln (for natural logarithm) was used in 1893 by Irving
Stringham (1847-1909) in Uniplanar Algebra (Cajori vol. 2,
page 107).
The same note from Jeff Miller mentioned above pointed out
that Anton Steinhauser used the abbreviation "log.nat." in
1875
William Oughtred (1574-1660) used a minus sign over the
characteristic of a logarithm in the Clavis Mathematicae
(Key to Mathematics), "except in the 1631 edition which does

not consider logarithms" (Cajori vol. 2, page 110). The

Clavis Mathematicae was composed around 1628 and published
in 1631 (Smith 1958, page 393). Cajori shows a use from the
1652 edition.
I also recently saw a post that suggested that in computer
classes it is sometimes common to use "lg" for the base two
log.
In 1647 the French mathematician Saint-Vincent showed that
the area under the hyperbola y = 1/x were like the logarithm
function, that is, the area from 1 to 2 plus the area from 1
to 3 was equal to the area from 1 to 6, 2x3.

Minute When the early sailors from the Eastern Mediterranean

chose to cut an arc into parts, they chose fractions in the
sexagesimal (base 60) system that was common to their period
in history. A nice article and illustrations of the
Babylonian system of numerals is found at the St. Andrews
Math-History page. Later when Latin writers described these
small parts of an arc, they used the Latin phrase pars
minuta, Latin for small parts. Our unit of time for 1/60 of
an hour adopted and contracted this phrase into minute. The
Conjugate word with the same spelling but different accent
and pronunciation (mi nyoot') continues to refer to
something very small.
The word MINUS for subtraction is drawn from the same root
and refers to making something smaller. The verbal use of
the words plus and minus date back to the Romans when the
terms were used much as we use the English words more and
less. Other related words are minor (smaller of two), minced
(cut into small pieces), miniature (on a small scale) and
menu (a small list).

Multiply comes from the combined roots of multi, many, and

pli, for folds, as in a number folded on itself many times.
The first use I have found of the word as a verb, as in
"multiply two by three" is credited to Chaucer in his 1391
work, A Treatise on the Astrolabe.

The two numbers that are multiplied together are most often
called factors and the result is called the Product.
Although they are not used much anymore, you may still find
the two parts that are multiplied together called the
multiplicand [that which is multiplied, or how many in each
group] and the multiplier[that which does the multipling, or
how many groups in all].
One of the earliest notations to indicate multiplication was
by juxtaposition, placing the numbers adjacent to each other
as we do for algebraic characters today. Cajori cites this
as the method used to indicate multiplication on some
ancient Indian manuscripts from the 10th century or earlier.
Jeff Miller has a note that "In 1553, Michael Stifel brought
out a revised edition of Rudolff's Coss, in which he showed
multiplication by juxtaposition and repeating a letter to
designate powers (Cajori vol. 1, pages 145-147)."
The use of an "x" to indicate the operation of
multiplication seems to have been originated by William
Oughtred in his Clavis Mathematicae (Key to Mathematics,
1631). The use of a dot, as in 6 .4 = 24, is sometimes
credited to Leibniz with the first use attributed to a
letter from Leibniz to John Bernoulli :
The dot was introduced as a symbol for multiplication by G.
W. Leibniz. On July 29, 1698, he wrote in a letter to John
Bernoulli: "I do not like X as a symbol for multiplication,
as it is easily confounded with x; ... often I simply relate
two quantities by an interposed dot and indicate
multiplication by ZC LM. Hence, in designating ratio I use
not one point but two points, which I use at the same time
for division." [A History of Mathematical Notation, Vol 1,
art. 233; F. Cajori]
From Jeff Millers web page on "Earliest Uses of Symbols of
Operation" I found the following correction to Cajori;
"Cajori shows the symbol as a raised dot. However, according
to Margherita Barile, consulting Gerhardt's edition of
Leibniz's Mathematische Schriften (G. Olms, 1971), the dot
is never raised, but is located at the bottom of the line.
She writes that the non-raised dot as a symbol for
multiplication appears in all the letters of 1698, and
earlier, and, according to the same edition, it already
appears in a letter by Johann Bernoulli to Leibniz dated
September, 2nd 1694 (see vol. III, part 1, page 148). Some
people credit the first use of a dot for multiplication to
Thomas Harriot. He used a dot in Analytica Praxis ad

Aequationes Algebraicas Resolvendas, which was published

posthumously in 1631. Cajori suggests these were not
acutally intended as symbols for the operation of
multiplication but "Scott (page 128) writes that Harriot was
'in the habit of using the dot to denote multiplication.'
And Eves (page 231) writes, 'Although Harriot on occasion
used the dot for multiplication, this symbol was not
prominently used until Leibniz adopted it." [from Jeff
Miller's page]. The use of a * instead of a dot appeared in
Teutsche Algebra (1659) by Johann Rahnn.
Some notes on notation for multiplicaton, The ancient Greeks
and Egyptians seemed to have no special symbol for
multiplication. Sometimes a word or phrase was used as we
might say "times" to indicate multiply. In the 16th Century
Stifel used the capital M and D for multiply and divide in
his Deutsche Arithmetica (1548). Other German writers did
not follow his lead, and it seems that Stifel quickly
dropped the symbols himself. Simon Stevin adopted the M and
D in L' arithmetique(1634). Cajori credits the use by
Christian Wolf and Euler in the 18th Century with making the
dot popular in Europe, and the strong influence of Oughtred
led to the more common use of the "x" in England, and in
America. In America today it seems that "x" is more common
through the teaching of arithmetic, and the dot is
introduced for awhile in the early algebra teaching; but
eventually the use of juxtaposition of variables, and
parentheses for numbers becomes the most common indiation of
multiplication. 3 x 4 = 3; 3 . 4; 3 (4)

Negative
Negative numbers, and the equivalent word for negative were
introduce by Brahmagupta, a Hindu mathematician around 600
AD. The Latin root of today's word is negare, to deny. The
negative numbers, in this sense, denying or invalidating an
equivalent positive quantity.
The negative numbers were themselves denied for a long part
of mathematical history, and only slowly came to be
accepted. The first record of the operational rules for what
we today call positive and negative numbers came from the
pen of Diophantus (around 250 AD) who referred to them as
"forthcomings" and "wantings". His work may have been drawn
from proposition five in Euclid's Book II of the Elements in

which Euclid demonstrates with geometric figures what we

would write in modern algebra as (a+b)(a-b)+b2 = a2. This, of
course, is easily recast as the more common identity
(a+b)(a-b)= a2 - b2. Diophantus would accept negatives only
as a way of diminishing a greater quantity, but did not
accept them as independent quantities and would not accept a
solution that was negative. Al-Khwarizmi (850 AD), whose
writings brought Arabic numerals to the west, used a similar
approach with negatives allowed in-process but not as a
final result.
Descartes, around 1636, used the French fausse, false, for
negative solutions. Thomas Harriot had described negative
roots as the solution to an alternate form of the equation
with the signs of the odd powers changed. Today his idea
would be expressed by saying that the appearance of -c as a
root of f(x) was only to be understood to mean that c is a
root of f(-x).
In Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, by Morris Kline
includes the following argument against negative numbers by
Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694), mathematician, theologian, and
friend of Blaise Pascal; "Arnauld questioned that -1:1 = 1:1 because, he said, -1 is less than +1; hence, how could a
smaller be to a greater as a greater is to a smaller?"
Franz Lemmermeyer wrote in a posting to the HistoriaMatematica newsgroup that Gleanings from the History of the
Negative Number by PGJ Vrendenduin suggests that a number
line with both positive and negative numbers could be found
in the work of Wallis (1657)[This is certainly true as seen
here]. Another posting to the same list quoted Kline's
"Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times":
"Though Wallis was advanced for his times and accepted
negative numbers, he thought they were larger than infinity
but not less than zero. In his 'Arithmetica Infinitorum'
(1665), he argued that since the ratio a/0, when a is
positive, is infinite, then, when the denominator is changed
to a negative number, as in a/b with b negative, the ratio
must be greater than infinity."
Even as late as 1831, De Morgan would still write that one
"must recollect that the signs + and - are not quantities,
but directions to add and subtract." [ Albrecht Heeffer
refutes this position, held by Kline and many others, in a
post to the math-history list. ] In a recent book by Gert
Schubring see clips here he also supports a view that

Wallis' understanding of negatives was much broader than

generally credited.
According to a post from Laura Laurencich, the Incas had a
method of indicating both positive and negative numbers on
their quipus as documented by the Jesuit Priest Blas Valeria
in 1618