17 Aug
2015
17 Aug
'15
10:23 a.m.
"It's well known that Simon Stevin came up with the concept of decimal representation. But did he consider infinite decimals?" http://www.archive.org/stream/larithmetiqvedes00stev#page/353/mode/1up The last three lines imply recognition of infinite decimals. Newton appreciated "the correspondence between decimal numbers and algebraic terms continued to infinity" (1671) and Wallis expressed the idea as "continued approximation" (1685). "who came up with 'point three bar'" Edward Hatton's "An intire system of arithmetic" (1721) uses "r" after a finitely expressed repeating decimal to indicate periodicity. Thus 1/3 is .3r, "or if a digit repeat after others are in the quotient" a number after the r expresses the number of terms repeated.