Timeline for What is the history of $\sqrt{}$
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 8, 2021 at 15:36 | comment | added | pinaki | @VesselinDimitrov: +1 for introducing (me to) Mazur's beautiful book. | |
| May 6, 2013 at 15:13 | history | edited | user112109 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 24, 2013 at 5:45 | comment | added | Paul Taylor | As well as his "narrative" History of Mathematics, Florian Cajori wrote a History of Mathematical Notation in two volumes that reports on the examination of a large number of manuscripts. In this, he denies the obvious derivation of the symbol from an "r". He says that, along with the crossed R notation, it was also customary to write roots using dots. Bizarrely, one dot was a square root, two a fourth, three a cube and four a ninth! Somehow this dot acquired an up-stroke, and that became the modern root symbol. | |
| Feb 8, 2013 at 19:16 | comment | added | user112109 | Thank you for the hint. And for those too lazy to lift a real book to the eyes here you can catch a glimpse: amazon.com/Imagining-Numbers-particularly-square-fifteen/dp/… | |
| Feb 8, 2013 at 17:20 | comment | added | Vesselin Dimitrov | One more reference: this question, and its resolution in the resemblance to a small "r" (for "radix"), is also brought up in Barry Mazur's Imagining numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), where further historical references may be found. | |
| Feb 8, 2013 at 16:22 | history | answered | user112109 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |