# Divisibility notation history

I'm writing a paper project for school about divisibility, so I'd like to include a bit of history about that subject. I'm mostly interested in notation of $|$ sign used in past, but everything else is appreciated. I need free online literature. Thanks.

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Try www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk for history of maths stuff. It is excellent! Also, you might find it interesting to know that "notation" is a relatively new invention. Back in the day, everything was done in words, and it wasn't until 1544 that $+$, $-$ and $\sqrt{}$ were introduced (see www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Stifel.html) –  user1729 Mar 26 '12 at 10:09
Earliest Uses of Various Mathematical Symbols is a superb resource for this kind of question, but unfortunately it doesn't appear to answer your question. –  MJD Mar 26 '12 at 16:35
Have you checked Cajori's book? –  Ｊ. Ｍ. Apr 14 '12 at 11:19
A bit of very modern history: the ISO 80000-2 standard (clause 2-7.17) now defines the symbol to be used as “∣” DIVIDES U+2223. It is not a particularly new character (has been in Unicode since version 1.0), and it is apparently meant to serve disambiguation, since the common “|” VERTICAL LINE has so many uses. Regarding the history of VERTICAL LINE in coded character sets (basically ASCII), check out cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7C –  Jukka K. Korpela Apr 14 '12 at 11:46