🛍️ PRIME DAY DEALS 🛍️NEWSPOLITICSENTERTAINMENTLIFEPERSONALVOICESSHOPPINGGAMESThis article is more than 12 years old. See today’s top stories Where and When Did the Symbols "+" and "–" Originate?The symbols for the arithmetic operations of addition (plus; "+") and subtraction (minus; "-") are so common today we hardly ever think about the fact that they didn't always exist.By Mario Livio, ContributorDr.Dr.Mar 12, 2013, 05:34 PM EDTThis post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, The symbols for the arithmetic operations of addition (plus; "+") and subtraction (minus; "–") are so common today we hardly ever think about the fact that they didn't always exist. In fact, someone first had to invent these symbols (or at least other ones that later evolved into the current form), and some time surely had to pass before the symbols were universally adopted. When I started looking into the history of these signs, I discovered to my surprise that they did not have their origin in antiquity. Much of what we know is based on an impressively comprehensive and still unsurpassed research (in 1928–1929) entitled History of Mathematical Notations by the Swiss-American historian of mathematics, Florian Cajori (1859–1930).The ancient Greeks expressed addition mostly by juxtaposition, but sporadically used the slash symbol "/" for addition and a semi-elliptical curve for subtraction. In the famous Egyptian Ahmes papyrus, a pair of legs walking forward marked addition, and walking away subtraction. The Hindus, like the Greeks, usually had no mark for addition, except that "yu" was used in the Bakhshali manuscript Arithmetic (which probably dates to the third or fourth century). Towards the end of the fifteenth century, the French mathematician Chuquet (in 1484) and the Italian Pacioli (in 1494) used "p" or "p" (indicating plus) for addition and "" or "m" (indicating minus) for subtraction.There is little doubt that our + sign has its roots in one of the forms of the word "et," meaning "and" in Latin. The first person who may have used the + sign as an abbreviation for et was the astronomer Nicole d'Oresme (author of The Book of the Sky and the World) at the middle of the fourteenth century. A manuscript from 1417 also has the + symbol (although the downward stroke is not quite vertical) as a descendent of one of the forms of et.Advertisement, The plus sign (+) and the minus sign (−) are mathematical symbols used to denote positive and negative functions, respectively. In addition, the symbol + represents the operation of addition, which results in a sum, while the symbol − represents subtraction, resulting in a difference. 1 Their use has been extended to many other meanings , Addition 3 + 2 = 5 with apples, a popular choice in textbooks [1] Addition (usually signified by the plus symbol, +) is one of the four basic operations of arithmetic, the other three being subtraction, multiplication, and division. The addition of two whole numbers results in the total or sum of those values combined..