Who is to blame for the decimal point vs. Until today, it remains the dot on the baseline (.), and the multiplication symbol is a raised dot ( So, the dot continued to be used to separate decimals from whole figures.Įven when in the 19th century the dot became the standard symbol for multiplication in the United States, the decimal separator didn’t change. In 18th century America, the cross (×) was more popular as a multiplication sign than the dot. Why is a decimal period used in the U.S.?Īmerican mathematicians didn’t follow the lead of their European counterparts. The comma as a decimal separator became standard in Europe in the 19th century, and remains so today. So, European mathematicians started to use a comma to separate decimals.
Leibniz was an influential mathematician, and the dot as a multiplication sign became widespread in Europe.īut this solution created another problem: The dot as a multiplication sign could be confused with the decimal point. Things changed in the 18th century, when mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-the father of integral and differential calculus-introduced the dot as a symbol for multiplication: “I do not like × as a symbol for multiplication, as it is easily confounded with x”, he wrote.
In the 17th century, the decimal point popular in Britain was also used in continental Europe, though some preferred the decimal comma. Why is the decimal comma used in most European countries? Thanks to the English translation of Napier’s treatise on logarithms, the decimal point became widespread in Britain as far back as the 17th century. In the 16th century, Italian cartographer Giovanni Antonio Magini and German mathematician Christopher Clavius were among the first to use a decimal point in their publications.īut the person who popularized the use of the decimal point was the inventor of logarithms, Scottish mathematician John Napier. The decimal point, it seems, though historians of mathematics aren’t certain. Which came first, the decimal point or the decimal comma? These symbols include the dot, comma, inverted comma, vertical bar, horizontal line, colon, semicolon, and even number zero.Įspecially in the 17th and 18th centuries, mathematicians used whichever notation seemed to strike their fancy, and so did typesetters. Throughout history, mathematicians have used all kinds of symbols to separate integers from decimals. Why do European countries use a decimal comma instead of a decimal point? For example, in British Canada the decimal point is used, whereas in French Canada a comma is used as a decimal separator.
And still in some other countries, both the decimal comma and the decimal period are used. In other countries, including most European countries, a comma is used before decimals. In many countries, in their respective languages, a period appears before decimals. In contrast, in the United States (as well as in other English-speaking countries including Australia, New Zealand, and the UK), the same amount is written as 300.10, using a decimal point. This means, for example, that three hundred euros and ten cents is written as 300,10-with a comma as a decimal marker. In most European countries, a comma is used to separate the integral part of a number from the decimal part. A document that was translated into English from another language may use the number formatting of the source language, no matter how confusing that may seem to a native English speaker. Of course, a document written in English by someone from a country in Europe may have numbers formatted as in English. In brief: Number formatting in Europe Number formatting in Europe: The decimal separatorīefore diving into this topic, I want to clarify that in this article, when I talk about how the decimal separator or thousands separator is used in a country, I’m referring to the language of that country, not to how its residents or citizens format numbers when writing in English.
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