Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics



This thorough and hugely interesting site has pictures on its home page of James Joseph Sylvester, who introduced the words matrix, discriminant, invariant, totient, and Jacobian; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who introduced the words variable, constant, function, abscissa, parameter, coordinate and perhaps derivative; René Descartes, who introduced the terms real number and imaginary number; Sir William Rowan Hamilton, who introduced the terms vector, scalar, tensor, associative, and quaternion; and John Wallis, who introduced the terms induction, interpolation, continued fraction, mantissa, and hypergeometric series.



And the riches don't end there. Googol, for instance, the name for that number that is 10 to the hundredth power; and googolplex, the number that is 10 to the googol power. I met both of those in one of Isaac Asimov's books on the history of number theory that I read while taking a great course in astronomy. More than good to meet them again, and in the company of a host of other interesting entries.



Via Iconomy, via Plep