Much ado about nothing. . .
I cannot resist saying that this reminds me of my first conversation
with Dr Iverson who laughed off the idea of "received" notation and
told me how the Greeks didn't even use zero and then went on to
explain the importance of eliminating the problem of the index origin
being a setting of either 0 or 1.
The classical Greeks mathematicians encountered zero in use in
Babylonian mathematics as an empty placeholder but they disdained to
use it and did not adopt a positional number system. Their
mathematics were based on geometry as described by Euclid's
Elements. They did not name their numbers either since they worked
with numbers as lengths of lines. However Greek merchants did name
numbers for their accounts and Greek Astronomers, who did associate
with those wise men from the east, used O, the Greek letter omikron,
the first letter of the greek word for nothing.
Monadic and dyadic derive from monad and dyad and have latin endings
for Greek words or numbers:
Monad: ORIGIN early 17th cent.: via late Latin from Greek monas,
monad- ‘unit,’ from monos ‘alone.’
Dyad: ORIGIN late 17th cent.(originally denoting the number two or a
pair): from late Latin dyas, dyad-, from Greek duas, from duo ‘two.’
Current senses date from the late 19th cent.
Triad: ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from French triade, or via late Latin
from Greek trias, triad-, from treis ‘three.’
nil: noun- zero, esp. as a score in certain games : they beat us
three-nil.
adjective-nonexistent : his chances for survival were slim, almost nil.
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Latin, contraction of nihil ‘nothing.’
Donna
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On 30-Jun-06, at 5:58 PM, Eugene McDonnell wrote:
On Jun 30, 2006, at 8:55 AM, Oleg Kobchenko wrote:
What does -adic mean in Greek?
Roughly speaking, Greek "dik" means "just" and "adik" means unjust.
Eugene
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