Timeline for Why is the identity element of a group denoted by $e$?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
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| Feb 8, 2014 at 21:49 | comment | added | Hagen von Eitzen | In todays German literature, it seems that Einselement (or even neutrales Element) is preferred over Einheit (which is used for units, i.e. invertible elements of a ring). | |
| Dec 29, 2012 at 17:35 | comment | added | Colin McLarty | Well, Weber surely popularized the term. But his friend Dedekind used "einheit" before him to mean either a unit in a field, or a unit measure in geometry, and I'll bet if you look in his work you'll find it for groups. Probably if you dig into the 19th century you can find a series of earlier and earlier, vaguer and vaguer, uses of the term for a group identity. | |
| Feb 9, 2012 at 9:08 | vote | accept | Keivan Karai | ||
| Feb 7, 2012 at 20:55 | comment | added | Jim Humphreys |
@Igor: The influential early textbooks on algebra tended to be written in German, unfair though that may be to those of us who grew up with English (or Russian). Quite a bit of common terminology and notation in mathematics seems to have originated in German work during the 19th century, such as the symbols $K,k$ for fields.
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| Feb 7, 2012 at 14:58 | comment | added | Igor Rivin | That is almost certainly the origin, though it should be noted that one in Russian is "edinica". | |
| Feb 7, 2012 at 14:15 | history | answered | user2035 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |