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From: mark millman <millman@us.ncipher.com> Subject: Re: (urth) A Little Dotty? * is an Artifact Date: Thu, 23 Dec 1999 09:47:22 At 9:29 pm Wednesday 22 December 1999, "Talarican" <chemmie@mindspring.com> wrote: > Dan, >> Hmmm, I always assumed the plate >> read: M . Million >> >> Sometimes a dot is used to indicate >> multiplication. "Monsieur" is often >> abbreviated to "M." > > You're right, of course. I would actually have > preferred to more correctly use a "bullet" dot > floating at mid-line height for this, but of course > the email character set wouldn't support it, so > far as I know. > > But that's how _I_ envisioned what Number > Five sees. His hungover revelation comes when > he realizes that the dot is not a period but a dot > at half-height in the line of text. > > I tried to approximate it with an asterisk, which > of course is also used as a multiplication sign, > esp. in most programming languages. I just got back from a business trip to England, where I saw people use a dot, not at half-height in the line, but at the bot- tom of the line (just like a punctuation period), to indicate mul- tiplication. Whether this is also customary in France, or among Francophone mathematicians, I can't say, but it seems possible. Mark Millman *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/