2026-10-14 11:49 UTC
I have always been puzzled a bit by the fact that all the way back to my earliest messing around with Basic, we all reached for X as our first variable. Same when they started teaching us Algebra in school, we always start with x, not a.
Apparently this was a convention begun by (or in the time of) Descartes, where you use letters from the start, A, B etc, for known quantities, and letters from the end, like X, for unknowns.
And now picture me sitting in a sunny field with Descartes. "That's cool, so we start with Z and work our way back, right?"
Descartes stares at me with his dead X-shaped eyes, like Anakin staring at Padme.
"Right?"
Replies (2)
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@klu9@ohai.social 2026-10-14 12:40
@jpaskaruk@growers.social Presumably Descartes was using the Latin alphabet, which ends with... X. Z (& Y) are Greek imports tacked on the end by some cultures that use them. /ackshually
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@drewdaniels@mastodon.online 2026-10-14 14:14
@jpaskaruk@growers.social I briefly had a calculus book from I think around 1965 and the big thing I remember (maybe incorrectly) was although the formulas were the same, it didn’t use x as the variable.