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Any integer can be written as a fraction with the number one as denominator. For example, 17 can be written as 17 / 1 , where 1 is sometimes referred to as the invisible denominator. [17] Therefore, every fraction and every integer, except for zero, has a reciprocal. For example, the reciprocal of 17 is 1 / 17 .
An interesting feature of ancient Egyptian mathematics is the use of unit fractions. [7] The Egyptians used some special notation for fractions such as 1 / 2 , 1 / 3 and 2 / 3 and in some texts for 3 / 4 , but other fractions were all written as unit fractions of the form 1 / n or sums of such unit ...
Letter cursivity (connectedness) of Arabic is also taken advantage of, in a few cases, to define variables using more than one letter. The most widespread example of this kind of usage is the canonical symbol for the radius of a circle نق (Arabic pronunciation:), which is written using the two letters nūn and qāf. When variable names are ...
In medieval Latin texts, sexagesimal numbers were written using Arabic numerals; the different levels of fractions were denoted minuta (i.e., fraction), minuta secunda, minuta tertia, etc. By the 17th century it became common to denote the integer part of sexagesimal numbers by a superscripted zero, and the various fractional parts by one or ...
Written mathematics began with numbers expressed as tally marks, with each tally representing a single unit. Numerical symbols consisted probably of strokes or notches cut in wood or stone, which were intelligible across cultures. For example, one notch in a bone represented one animal, person, or object.
This last non-simple continued fraction (sequence A110185 in the OEIS), equivalent to = [;,,,,,...], has a quicker convergence rate compared to Euler's continued fraction formula [clarification needed] and is a special case of a general formula for the exponential function:
A later text, the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, introduced improved ways of writing Egyptian fractions. The Rhind papyrus was written by Ahmes and dates from the Second Intermediate Period; it includes a table of Egyptian fraction expansions for rational numbers , as well as 84 word problems. Solutions to each problem were written out in scribal ...
The blackboard bold letter style originated in the 1960s to distinguish bold letters from ordinary letters on a blackboard or using a typewriter; in professionally typeset documents, bold fonts were used for the same purpose. Since then, blackboard bold has gradually gained currency, and is now commonly used in mathematical printing to denote ...