I'm writing a paper project for school about divisibility, so I'd like to include a bit of history about that subject. I'm mostly interested in notation of $|$ sign used in past, but everything else is appreciated. I need free online literature. Thanks.
Divisibility notation history
4
$\begingroup$
elementary-number-theory
soft-question
notation
math-history
-
2Try http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/ for history of maths stuff. It is excellent! Also, you might find it interesting to know that "notation" is a relatively new invention. Back in the day, everything was done in words, and it wasn't until 1544 that $+$, $-$ and $\sqrt{}$ were introduced (see http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Stifel.html) – 2012-03-26
-
2[Earliest Uses of Various Mathematical Symbols](http://jeff560.tripod.com/mathsym.html) is a superb resource for this kind of question, but unfortunately it doesn't appear to answer your question. – 2012-03-26
-
0Have you checked Cajori's book? – 2012-04-14
-
2A bit of very modern history: the ISO 80000-2 standard (clause 2-7.17) now defines the symbol to be used as “∣” DIVIDES U+2223. It is not a particularly new character (has been in Unicode since version 1.0), and it is apparently meant to serve disambiguation, since the common “|” VERTICAL LINE has so many uses. Regarding the history of VERTICAL LINE in coded character sets (basically ASCII), check out http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7C – 2012-04-14