Publisher's Synopsis
Mathematical notations such as the plus sign and the minus sign are as familiar as the letters of the alphabet but each mathematical symbol has a history all of its own which is quite separate from the history of literary glyphs. This book takes as its starting point two renowned histories of mathematical notation, those of Florian Cajori and Johannes Tropfke, and through careful examination of additional texts pushes the origins of many arithmetical notations further back in time. The book takes full advantage of recent large-scale digitization initiatives by including snippets from original texts that show the early usage and evolution of these notations.
