Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2013 February 23

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February 23

Mathematical symbol for specifically integer division

Anyone know of any published papers in which some specific mathematical symbol other the ones normally used to denote division (fraction line, forward slash, and division sign) was used for specifically integer division (that is, the operation performed by computers when working with integer data types in which 7 / 2 = 3 rather than 7 / 2 = 3.5) in formulas or equations in which there would be ambiguity (in a formula or equation which contains both integer and "rational" division)? For example, according to [1], an earlier version of the programming language Groovy used the backslash (\) as an operator to distinguish integer division from "rational" division, which used the usual forward slash that most programming languages use for the operation. Basically, I'm wondering if there is any previously established symbol in the mathematics scholarly literature for specifically/explicitly integer division. —SeekingAnswers (reply) 00:43, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Addendum: I know some papers simply surround the expression with the floor function symbols (like $\lfloor n/2\rfloor$) to get an effectively identical result, but I was wondering if anyone knows of any other symbol for the division operator itself. —SeekingAnswers (reply) 01:11, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

None that I'm aware of. For some purposes in mathematical logic, it's convenient to have an operation (on the naturals) that's like subtraction except it returns zero if subtraction would give a negative answer — this is called "monus" and is represented by a minus sign with a dot on top. That's a similar sort of idea, in a way, but I don't know of any such thing for integer division. --Trovatore (talk) 01:28, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

I only know examples from programming languages. PARI/GP uses \. Python (programming language)#expression says: "In both Python 2.2+ and Python 3, // can be used to do integer division." PrimeHunter (talk) 01:34, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Basic uses \ -- SGBailey (talk) 22:55, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

make computation

how to make computation easy in chemistry? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 101.58.187.113 (talk) 20:15, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

In most applications of mathematics, you should start by formulating your question as precisely as possible. I think this holds for applications in chemistry, too. JoergenB (talk) 22:48, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Care to tell us what type of computations you mean ? Balancing a chemical equation, for example ? StuRat (talk) 02:59, 25 February 2013 (UTC)