who invented the multiplication symbol? WHY?
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I think the multiplication symbol was first thought up by the...Arabs. one of the anchient people from that time frame. I forgot exactly who, but the civilization that came up with Algebra is the same one who came up with the Multiplication function in mathmatics. This was before the Dark Ages in Europe.
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Gottfried Wilhelm von LEIBNIZ\n(1646-1716)  . \n\n \n Leibniz, sometimes called the last universal genius, invented at least two things that are essential for the modern world: calculus, and the binary system. \nModern physics, math, engineering would be unthinkable without the former: the fundamental method of dealing with infinitesimal numbers. Leibniz developed it around 1673. In 1679, he perfected the notation for integration and differentiation that everyone is still using today. \n\nThe bit and the binary system he invented around 1679, and published in 1701. This became the basis of virtually all modern computers. \n\nLeibniz' final years were overshadowed by a priority fight with the powerful president of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, who claimed he had invented calculus before Leibniz (without publishing it), and who made friends sign texts he wrote to support this claim.
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John Venn (August 4, 1834 - April 4, 1923) was an English mathematician/logician who invented the Venn diagram.
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History of Imaginary Numbers:\n\n\nComplex numbers were being used by mathematicians long before they were first properly defined, so it's difficult to trace the exact origin.\n \nThe first reference that I know of (but there may be earlier ones) is by Cardan in 1545, in the course of investigating roots of polynomials. During this period of time the notation underroot-1 was used, but more in the sense of a convenient fiction to categorize the properties of some polynomials, by describing how their roots would behave if we pretend that they have them. It was seen how the notation could lead to fallacies such as that described in the Classic Fallacies section of this web site, so square root -1 was considered a useful piece of notation when putting polynomials into categories, but was not seen as a real mathematical object. \n\nLater Euler in 1777 eliminated some of the problems by introducing the notation i and -i for the two different square roots of -1. With him originated the notation a + bi for complex numbers. He also began to explore the extension of functions like the exponential function to the case of complex-valued arguments. However, the numbers i and -i were called "imaginary" (an unfortunate choice of terminology which has remained to this day), because their existence was still not clearly understood. \n\nWessel in 1797 and Gauss in 1799 used the geometric interpretation of complex numbers as points in a plane, which made them somewhat more concrete and less mysterious. \n\nFinally, Hamilton in 1833 put complex numbers on a sound mathematical footing by showing that pairs of real numbers with an appropriately defined multiplication form a number system, and that Euler's previously mysterious "i" can simply be interpreted as one of these pairs of numbers. That was the point at which the modern formulation of complex numbers can be considered to have begun.
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The name algebra is derived from the treatise titled:\nAl-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah\n(translated as "The book of summary concerning calculating by transposition and reduction")\n\nThe book was written by the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi in AD 820.\n\nThe word al-jabr means "reunion"\n\nKhwarizmi is often considered as the "father of modern algebra"\n\nMuch of Khwarizmi's works on reduction was included in the book and added to many methods we have in Algebra now. \n\nsource:wikipedia\n820 AD: The word algebra is derived from an operation described in the treatise first written by Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi titled: Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah meaning The book of summary concerning calculating by transposition and reduction. The word al-jabr means "reunion". Khwarizmi is often considered as the "father of modern algebra". Much of Khwarizmi's works on reduction was included in the book and added to many methods we have in Algebra now. \nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra#History
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Say hola to Bernhard Riemann. The man who paved the way for relativity also developed the symbol for congruence!
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Some potentially useful vocabulary:\n\nThe answer of an addition is called a sum.\nThe answer of a subtraction is called a difference.\nThe answer of a multiplication is called a product.\nThe answer of a division is called a quotient.\n\nNow, the specific question you are asking... the format of the answer will depend on what it is you have learned. It could be:\n\nb [division symbol] 7\nb[division symbol]7 = ____\nb/7\nb/7=___\n\nor something else! Check your textbook/notes.
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"It has several names, some confusing. The most common is probably 'hash'. In the US it is sometimes called the 'pound sign' and used as a symbol for pounds weight, but this confuses the British, for whom a pound sign is £. In music, of course, it is a 'sharp'. The picturesque name 'octothorpe' has also been introduced: it is said to have been invented by an employee of Bell Laboratories in the 1960s, in honour of the American athlete Jim Thorpe. In the large form in which it appears on modern telephones it is sometimes called 'square'"\n\nI"n the United States of America, the symbol is traditionally called the pound sign. It derives from a series of abbreviations for pound avoirdupois, a unit of mass. At first "lb." was used; later, printers got a special font made up of an "lb" with a line through the ascenders so that the "l" would not be mistaken for a "1". Unicode character U+2114 (℔) is called the "LB Bar Symbol," and it is a cursive development of this symbol. Finally came the reduction to two horizontal and two vertical strokes.\n\nIts traditional commercial use in the U.S. was such that when it followed a number, it was to be read as 'pounds': 5# of sugar. And when it preceded a number, it was to be read as 'number': #2 pencil, which still appears on U.S. pencils. Thus the same character in a printer's type case had two uses."
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John Harrison developed longitude.\n\nLatitude is a bit more difficult to determine and is mostly about mathematics but I believe mathematician Karl Gauss had something to do with it. But you should research that some more.
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Well the group theory actually came from Benjamin Franklin...many didn't know this.  And it's funny because it came from the process of cooling down the "Liberty Bell".  They were theorizing about formulas for the ideal cooling scenario for the Liberty Bell but against Ben's better judgement they opted for faster cooling process and packed the Liberty Bell with ice.  It cracked.  Ben's formula was correct and thus formed "Abstract Algebra".
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A pound is always written as "lb" to prevent confusion with pound (money) It is very old, traced back to the Roman "libra" (which explains its abreviation!). It was defined in England since Ethelred the Unready (968-1016). In fact, a pound (money) was originally a pound (weight) of silver, and the symbol for pound (money) is a stylised L.
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The common symbol often used for pi, is the lowercase Greek letter P.  Euler popularized William Jones use of the symbol, which Jones first put the symbol to the number in 1706. Other mathmaticians before that had applied the symbol to related ratios.
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This seems like a sort of ridiculous thing to ask here. Why not just do a search for math trivia? Here is a link for example that I found right away.
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The Order of Operations rules as we know them could not have existed \nbefore algebraic notation existed; but I strongly suspect that they \nexisted in some form from the beginning - in the grammar of how people \ntalked about arithmetic when they had only words, and not symbols, to \ndescribe operations. It would be interesting to study that grammar in \nGreek and Latin writings and see how clearly it can be detected.\n\nAt the other end, I think that computers have influenced the subject, \nso that it is taught more rigidly now than it used to be, since \nprogramming languages have had to define how every expression is to be \ninterpreted. Before then, it was more acceptable to simply recognize \nsome forms, like x/yz, as ambiguous and ignore them - something I \nthink we should do more often today, considering some of the questions \nwe get on such issues.\n\nI spent some time researching this question, because it is asked \nfrequently, but I have not found a definitive answer yet. We can't say \nany one person invented the rules, and in some respects they have \ngrown gradually over several centuries and are still evolving.\n\nHere are my conclusions, perhaps in more detail than you want:\n\n1. The basic rule (that multiplication has precedence over addition) \nappears to have arisen naturally and without much disagreement as \nalgebraic notation was being developed in the 1600s and the need for \nsuch conventions arose. Even though there were numerous competing \nsystems of symbols, forcing each author to state his conventions at \nthe start of a book, they seem not to have had to say much in this \narea. This is probably because the distributive property implies a \nnatural hierarchy in which multiplication is more powerful than \naddition, and makes it desirable to be able to write polynomials with \nas few parentheses as possible; without our order of operations, we \nwould have to write\n\n     ax^2 + bx + c\nas\n     (a(x^2)) + (bx) + c\n\nIt may also be that the concept existed before the symbolism, perhaps \njust reflecting the natural structure of problems such as the \nquadratic.\n\nYou can see an example of early notation in "Earliest Uses of Grouping \nSymbols" at:\n\n   http://members.aol.com/jeff570/grouping.html   \n\nwhere the use of a vinculum (an early version of parentheses) shows, \nboth in its presence (around an additive expression) and its absence \n(around the multiplicative term "B in D") that the rules were \nimplicitly followed:\n                                                 ________________\n   In Van Schooten's 1646 edition of Vieta, B in D quad. + B in D\n   is used to represent B(D^2 + BD). \n\n2. There were some exceptions early in this development; in \nparticular, math historian Florian Cajori quotes many writers for \nwhom, in the special case of a factorial-like expression such as\n\n     n(n-1)(n-2)\n\nthe multiplication sign seems to have had some of the effect of an \naggregation symbol; they would write\n\n     n * n - 1 * n - 2\n\n(using a dot or cross where I have the asterisks) to express this. Yet \nCajori points out that this was an exception to a rule already \nestablished, by which "nn-1n-2" would be taken as the quadratic \n"n^2 - n - 2." \n\nThere was also an early notation in which a multiplication would be \nreplaced by a comma to indicate aggregation: \n\n     n, n - 1 \n\nwould mean\n     \n     n (n - 1) \n\nwhereas \n     \n     nn-1 \n\nmeant\n\n     n^2 - 1.\n\n3. Some of the specific rules were not yet established in Cajori's own \ntime (the 1920s). He points out that there was disagreement as to \nwhether multiplication should have precedence over division, or \nwhether they should be treated equally. The general rule was that \nparentheses should be used to clarify one's meaning - which is still \na very good rule. I have not yet found any twentieth-century \ndeclarations that resolved these issues, so I d
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multiplication\n\n\nDoug
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Like many mathematical ideas, symbolic algebraic notation arose almost simultaneously in many parts of the world as the need was found for it. It seems it was generally accepted to the greatest degree in the 14th century. See http://www.cs.xu.edu/math/math147/02f/algebra/algebra.html for more information.
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3^2\n\nThe ^ called carat indicates exponentiation, or "three raised to the power of 2".