10 Jul
2016
10 Jul
'16
8:11 p.m.
On 9 July 2016 at 09:22, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
If 19961 is the oldest citation the OED can come up
with, "slash"
really is a coinage of the computer age. Yet the character had
been in algebra books for centuries. The oral tradition that underlies
eqn would be the authority for a "solid" name. I suspect, though,
that regardless of what the algebra books called it, the name
would be "divided by".
Out of curiosity, I consulted Cajori [1]. All sorts of notations were
used to denote division (including reversed letters) in antiquity
although fractions were commonly denoted by numerator above a
separating line and denominator below. In 1659, Johann Heinrich Rahn
introduced the symbol ÷ (period above and below a minus sign, Unicode
00F7 -- apologies if the symbol does not display) for division, having
been previously used to indicate subtraction. In 1684, G.W. Liebniz
introduced ':' for division. Later authors used both solidus and
reverse-solidus to indicate division. (Frustratingly, Cajori never
gives a name to the symbol '/'.)
Here is the start of Para. 240 (shades of Algol vs C): "There are
perhaps no symbols which are as completely observant of political
boundaries as are ÷ [Unicode 00F7] and : as symbols for division. The
former belongs to Great Britain, the British dominions, and the United
States. The latter belongs to Continental Europe and the
Latin-American countries." In 1923, the US National Committee on
Mathematical Requirements recommended dropping ÷ (Unicode 00F7) in
favour of the symbol '/' (again nameless).
Bemer, an IBM engineer, argued that the Selectric type ball should be
designed to carry 64 characters required for ASCII, rather than the
typewriter standard 44
(http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/selectric) The
suggestion was dismissed. Knuth, in his TeXbook, refers to
"non-mathematical slashes" and entries for virgule and solidus say
"See slash".
[1] A History Of Mathematical Notations Vol I
N.