Thank you all for your replies. You cleared up one thing for me. I could not recall which of my math teachers showed me the 1 with the extended serif. Was it Burdoin at St. Paul's School, or maybe Anil Nerode or Juris Hartmanis at Cornell? No, it was my Miss McKinnon, my high school French teacher. And I also remember the crossed 7s. I wonder how much of historical handwriting and typography gets lost in the translation to computer. For instance in Unicode, should/does the long serif 1 and crossed 7 have their own glyphs, or are these just stylistic renderings of the standard digits 1 and 7? I do find a font on my computer, "Edwardian Script ITC", in which the 1 serif extends about 2/3 of the way to the baseline, but the 7 is uncrossed in this font. A quick web search turns up nothing about the downstroked radical sign. I have no idea of its origin or if it has been recorded (maybe it occurs in blackboard photos). I have never seen it in a book font. I assume there are many mathematical handwriting and historical symbols that won't survive the digital transition. One that springs to mind is the old factorial symbol, a preceding vertical bar connected to an underline of the expression. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christian Boyer" <cboyer@club-internet.fr> To: <ham>; "'math-fun'" <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Friday, May 06, 2005 6:57 AM Subject: RE: [math-fun] Questions about written numbers On Friday 06 May 2005 09:06, David Wilson wrote:
1. I had a professor who tried to teach us to write the digit 1 with the serif extended to the baseline, like a very narrow upper case lambda. Ostensibly this was easier to write and gave the digit 1 more body than a single stroke. Has anyone ever heard of this technique of writing the digit 1?
De la part de Gareth McCaughan Envoyé : vendredi 6 mai 2005 11:14
It's common in France, I think.
Gareth, I confirm that in France we write our 1 as you says, upper left serif extended near to the baseline (but not completely extended until the baseline). And to avoid the confusion with the 7, we cross the 7 with a dash added in its middle. Christian. _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun