Computation, Mathematical Notation, and Linguistics

Much like ordinary natural languages, most of the mathematical notation we have today has grown up over a long period of time by a kind of natural selection. Occasionally explicit efforts to systematize the notation have been made—though they have been remarkably few and far between. In the late 1600s, Leibniz, for example, was quite concerned with mathematical notation—seeing it as an opportunity to move toward a more universal language, free of the controversies of particular ordinary languages. He invented the integral sign, the d/dx notation for derivatives (where he worried people would try to “cancel the d’s”), and attacked the use of * for multiplication (“will be confused with the letter x”).