What a cool word. There are a few Greek words with this stem, which all seem to share a sense of measuring, aligning, or marking out. The feminine noun "stathma" or "stathme" means a carpenter's rule or line; the masculine "stathmos" is an animal's rectangular stall. The verb "stathmao" means "measure by rule." The neuter noun "stathmon" means a weight. I'm not sure if all of these have the same etymological origin. I can't find any occurrences in Euclid, but my searching skills in Ancient Greek are poor, so it may be in there in some other form. On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
We were taught in Algebra that a stathm is a function on a ring that can be used like absolute value on the integers to prove the Euclidean algorithm.
It's in some math books, but I can't find it in any dictionary, not even the OED. Does anyone know of any dictionary where this word appears?
--Dan
_____________________________________________________________________ "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi." --Peter Schickele
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun