History of

MATHEMATICS
SYMBOL
Presented By: Christopher
Tranx Delos Reyes
• TheOne of the simplest mathematical statements possible is
2+2=4.

While the concept is very easy to understand, when you write it

down you have to use mathematical symbols which are,
historically speaking, a relatively recent invention.

At one point, mathematicians were doing reasonably complicated

work without the benefit of symbols at all. Something which is
unthinkable today.
 The first people we know of who used
mathematics were the ancient Babylonians and
Sumerians. With their cuniform system of
writing, they were able to do reasonably
complicated mathematics.

Their numeral system was base-60, as opposed

to ours which is base-10. The theory holds that
two earlier people merged to become the
Sumerians and one group had a system that
was base-12 and the other had a system that
was base-5. They resolved the difference by
using 60, which was just 5 x 12.
They were able to solve quadratic equations,
knew about square and cube roots, and had
solved the Pythagorean theorem well before
Pythagoras.

However, they lacked a few things. They didn’t have a zero, which is
something I talked about in my episode about zero, and didn’t really
have any symbolic expressions to do equations.
It wouldn’t look like algebra as we are familiar with it.
• The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs all
managed to do mathematics at some level
without the use of mathematical symbols.

• Algebra was actually named by Arab scholars

and it literally comes from “al-jabr” which means
a reunion of broken parts.

• Arab scholars probably took mathematics as far

as anyone in history up until that time, but they
still mostly weren’t using symbolic notation.
Plus Sign
The symbols we know and use today
weren’t created until the 15th century.

The first use of the plus sign was in

1489 by German mathematician
Johannes Widmann.

The plus sign just represents the

letter “t” which was a short form of
the Latin word “et” which means
“and”.
 Minus Sign
Likewise, Widmann was the first person to use the minus sign as
well. The minus sign is believed to come from a tilde which was
sometimes placed over a number to represent subtraction.

In his treatise, he explicitly defined the new terms which he

created. He said “was ? ist, das ist minus, und das + ist das mer”.
Mer being German for more.

There were other previous attempts to create symbols that did the
same thing, but they didn’t catch on. The Egyptians had a symbol
that could be used for addition and the mirror image of it could be
used for subtraction, but it never went beyond Egypt.
Multiplication Symbol
Not long after, in the early 17th century, the
multiplication symbol was created. This is of course
just the letter “x”.

The first use of “x” to denote multiplication was in

1618 by Scottish mathematician John Napier in his
book Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio.

He too explained the use of this new symbol in the

book by saying, “Multiplication of species [i.e.
unknowns] connects both proposed magnitudes with
the symbol ‘in’ or ×: or ordinarily without the symbol if
the magnitudes be denoted with one letter.”
Technically, in printing, the multiplication symbol isn’t actually the
letter x. It is a slightly smaller character of the same shape which
is raised up.

There can be confusion when using a regular keyboard with “x”

as a multiplication symbol and using “x” as a variable. Gottfried
Leibniz, one of the co-inventors of calculus, disliked using an “x”
for this reason.

For that reason, a dot is also sometimes used as a multiplication

symbol. This is usually more popular in Europe, and it too can be
confusing because a dot is used for a special type of vector
multiplication.
DIVISION SYMBOL
The earliest of the modern division
symbols which we use is called the
obelus. This is the straight line with a
dot above and below it.

This was first used in 1659 by Swiss

mathematician Johann Rahn.
 Myth

The preferred division symbol is called the solidus or the

forward slash. This is very similar to, and conveys the same
meaning, as the horizontal line used in fractions. This was a
much later creation and wasn’t to represent division until 1845.

The adoption of computers only strengthened the use of the

solidus over the obelus as the obelus isn’t on most keyboards.
Equal Sign

The equal symbol was first used in 1557 by Welsh mathematician

Robert Recorde in his book The Whetstone of Witte.

In his book, he was writing equations, and over 200 times he had to
write the phrase “is equal to”. He basically got sick of writing it over
and over, so he eventually created a symbol so he didn’t have to write
it anymore.

He said in his book, “And to avoid the tedious repetition of these

words: “is equal to” I will set as I do often in work use, a pair of
parallels, or duplicate lines of one [the same] length, thus: =, because
no 2 things can be more equal.”
Infinity Sign
The infinity symbol, that being the number 8 on its side, is even
older than the modern number 8, which is a Hindu-Arabic
number. The earliest evidence for it goes back to the cross of St.
Boniface in the 7th or 8th century.

The first use of it to signify infinity wasn’t until 1655. English

clergyman John Wallis used it in his book De sectionibus conicis.
There was no explanation given as to why it was selected, but one
hypothesis is that it is a variant of the symbol used for the Roman
Number 1000, which was the letter C, followed by an I, and then
with a backward C.