The dotted dash. I don’t recall that symbol being used much, if at all, even in high school, the slash/solidus being the main symbol at that time. Or is it just used as a teaching tool for a teacher to give a list of math problems to work out, and by high school you’re working with formulas more than simple division problems.
I don’t know the answer to your OP, but I thank you for bringing the terms “obelus,” “solidus,” and “vinculum” to the attention of this occasional Scrabble player.
My 9 year old sister is just learning division; half of the problems in her math book have that in them. The others have the close parenthesis and vinculum. They haven’t introduced the solidus to her, yet.
Right on! I never knew these things had such cool names!
My guess is that the one-key approach for typing such things has forced the default + - X / ^ symbols, especially in programming languages like COBOL and BASIC. But I would be thrilled to read the history of the usage of the various symbols including the time spans of their dominance. Such things are fascinating trivia, especially if authenticated by scholarship.
Good luck with the thread. You just got my best shot!
One teacher felt that introducing the slash too early would confuse kids who wouldn’t know whether they were doing division or fractions. In my mind, that’s the whole bloody point - fractions and division are the same! But from the teacher’s perspective (in regards to answering homework and test problems) it makes sense. If you get 1/3 as a division problem, the teacher wants 0.33333 as an answer. If you get get 1/3 as a fraction, that’s already the properly reduced answer and you’re done. By using different symbols, the kids have a better idea how to answer.
(asterisk, for ‘little star’) is the standard multiplication symbol, because X is always a variable name (and complicating the compiler so it can disambiguate ‘X X 3’ just isn’t worth it).
I have always known the half-height dot (⋅) to be used for multiplication in textbooks, not the asterisk. And, yes, I’ve seen the current worksheets, and they include multiple ways to indicate division.
In upper-level textbooks, multiplication is usually just concatenation, unless there’s some reason that won’t work (for instance, if a very long equation has to span lines in between terms), in which case it’s the x-shaped symbol (not actually the letter x, but a slightly different character).