Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics (X)

Last revision: June 01, 2003

X-AXIS. Axis of x appears in "On the Attractions of Homogeneous Ellipsoids" by James Ivory, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 99. (1809), pp. 345-372. [JSTOR].

X-axis appears in 1886 in W. B. Smith, Elem. Co-Ordinate Geom.: OX, OY, are called Co-ordinate Axes, or axes of X and Y, or X- and Y-axes" (OED2).

The terms X-COORDINATE, Y-COORDINATE, and Z-COORDINATE appear in a paper published by James Joseph Sylvester in 1863 [James A. Landau].

X-INTERCEPT is found in 1924 in Analytic Geometry by Arthur M. Harding and George W. Mullins: "If a curve cuts the x and y axes at the points A and B respectively, the segment OA is called the intercept on the x axis or the x intercept, and the segment OB is called the intercept on the y axis or the y intercept."

Geetha Home - A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z - Sources