UNDER SUBTRACTION

HISTORY OF MINUS SIGN

Our familiar  - sign was not used until only four to five hundred years ago. Diophantus of Alexandria and the Hindus (seventh century A.D.) indicated subtraction by simply placing all the quantities to be subtract side by side.

Diophantus used the symbol, , followed by all the negative terms, side by side, to indicate subtraction. The Hindus indicated subtraction by placing a dot over the quantity to be subtracted (the subtrahend).

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, some of the Italian mathematicians introduced symbols into their algebra. Luca Pacioli used  m (from meno, "less") for minus in his Summa de arithmetica of 1494.

The - symbol first appeared in print in Leipzig in 1489 in an arithmetic by Johann Widman. Here the symbols were used to indicate deficiency, not the subtraction operations of today. In 1514 the Dutch mathematician Vander Hoecke used the - symbol for algebraic operation, but it is believed that it was used this way even earlier.

 The minus sign is believed to be from the abbreviation of  for minus.