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 of Grammateus, a teacher at the University of Vienna. His pupil, Christoff Rudolff, the writer of the first text-book on algebra in the German language (printed in 1525), employs these symbols also. So did Stifel, who brought out a second edition of Rudolff's Coss in 1553. Thus, by slow degrees, their adoption became universal. There is another short-hand symbol of which we owe the origin to the Germans. In a manuscript published sometime in the fifteenth century, a dot placed before a number is made to signify the extraction of a root of that number. This dot is the embryo of our present symbol for the square root. Christoff Rudolff, in his algebra, remarks that "the radix quadrata is, for brevity, designated in his algorithm with the character $$\scriptstyle{\surd}$$, as $$\scriptstyle{\surd 4}$$." Here the dot has grown into a symbol much like our own. This same symbol was used by Michael Stifel. Our sign of equality is due to Robert Recorde (1510-1558), the author of The Whetstone of Witte (1557), which is the first English treatise on algebra. He selected this symbol because no two things could be more equal than two parallel lines =. The sign $$\scriptstyle{\div}$$ for division was first used by Johann Heinrich Rahn, a Swiss, in 1659, and was introduced in England by John Pell in 1668.

Michael Stifel (1486?-1567), the greatest German algebraist of the sixteenth century, was born in Esslingen, and died in Jena. He was educated in the monastery of his native place, and afterwards became Protestant minister. The study of the significance of mystic numbers in Revelation and in Daniel drew him to mathematics. He studied German and Italian works, and published in 1544, in Latin, a book entitled Arithmetica integra, Melanchthon wrote a preface to it. Its three parts treat respectively of rational numbers, irrational numbers, and algebra. Stifel gives a table containing the numerical values of the binomial coefficients for powers below the 18th. He observes an advantage in letting a geometric