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A vinculum (from Latin vinculum 'fetter, chain, tie') is a horizontal line used in mathematical notation for various purposes. It may be placed as an overline or underline above or below a mathematical expression to group the expression's elements.
An overline, overscore, or overbar, is a typographical feature of a horizontal line drawn immediately above the text. In old mathematical notation, an overline was called a vinculum, a notation for grouping symbols which is expressed in modern notation by parentheses, though it persists for symbols under a radical sign.
The following table lists many common symbols, together with their name, how they should be read out loud, and the related field of mathematics. Additionally, the subsequent columns contains an informal explanation, a short example, the Unicode location, the name for use in HTML documents, [1] and the LaTeX symbol.
The symbol was first seen in print without the vinculum (the horizontal "bar" over the numbers inside the radical symbol) in the year 1525 in Die Coss by Christoff Rudolff, a German mathematician. In 1637 Descartes was the first to unite the German radical sign √ with the vinculum to create the radical symbol in common use today. [3]
3. Also used in place of \ for denoting the set-theoretic complement; see \ in § Set theory. × (multiplication sign) 1. In elementary arithmetic, denotes multiplication, and is read as times; for example, 3 × 2. 2. In geometry and linear algebra, denotes the cross product. 3.
Mathematical notation is widely used in mathematics, science, and engineering for representing complex concepts and properties in a concise, unambiguous, and accurate way. For example, the physicist Albert Einstein 's formula E = m c 2 {\displaystyle E=mc^{2}} is the quantitative representation in mathematical notation of mass–energy ...
The "hierarchy of operations", also called the "order of operations" is a rule that saves needing an excessive number of symbols of grouping.In its simplest form, if a number had a plus sign on one side and a multiplication sign on the other side, the multiplication acts first.
From my high-school mathematics, I remember that the vinculum is used to 'bracket' parts of a mathematical expression. This is the order of precendence for evaluating a mathematical expression which had multiple types of 'brackets' (from memory):