Once a notation is known to exist, which of several candidates gets adopted is decided substantially by institutional and social power, not by usability alone

history-of-notationhcinotationinstitutionspowergeneral-theory

Zhang, Glassman, et al.'s 2026 "How Notations Evolve" argues that "notational wars" between competing candidate notations are resolved by more than technical merit. Their example: the equality symbol "=", introduced by Robert Recorde in 1557, contested with an alternative symbol of René Descartes'; adoption split largely along geographic proximity to Descartes, and the paper reports historian Florian Cajori's conclusion that the eventual dominance of "=" was ultimately "a matter of power, namely, Leibniz's prestige to adjudicate."

If adoption of an already-visible notation depends on an institutional champion or a figure's prestige rather than the notation simply being good, that supplies a second half of a mechanism alongside claim-notation-disperses-only-after-formal-publication-or-institutionalization: a private notation can fail to spread even after it stops being secret, if nobody with institutional standing takes it up. This is consistent with, though not identical to, the documented Nemeth case (claim-nemeth-code-stayed-private-until-witcher-request), where the institutionalizing step was a committee (the Joint Uniform Braille Committee) rather than one person's prestige — a live, modern parallel is the Nemeth-code/UEB standards dispute connected at claim-bana-2012-ueb-adoption-kept-nemeth-code-parallel.