Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2012 March 17

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March 17

Name the terms

Products have factors, sums have summands. Do we have names for the individual terms in subtraction and division? (In the case of division, please don't say numerator and denominator.) I'm guessing that we don't because subtraction and division are not associative operations, and so a long string of "unbracketed" repeated subtractions or divisions is not always well defined. — Fly by Night (talk) 18:33, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

See the lead sections of Division (mathematics) and Subtraction. Some of these terms are used more than others though; i'd never heard of minuend or subtrahend before. Qwfp (talk) 18:43, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I'll take a look now.

Exponentiation is also nonassociative, but we have the common terms "base" and "exponent". Other obscure terms: The thing inside a radical is the radicand. The thing inside an integral is the integrand. Not sure if there are words like this for the object of a derivative or logarithm (or anything else). Staecker (talk) 22:01, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

I think most people are familiar with integrand. — Fly by Night (talk) 22:44, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Where would we be without useful mathematical terms such as abscissa? Rschwieb (talk) 00:39, 18 March 2012 (UTC)