---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "flagged (two stacked gaps: [unverified-quote — needs direct read] on the Zhang/Glassman paper itself, same as its sibling notes and tracked at [[question-verify-zhang-2026-how-notations-evolve-primary-source]]; and the embedded Recorde/Descartes/Leibniz anecdote is itself a secondary citation to Florian Cajori's 'A History of Mathematical Notations' (1928-29), explicitly not independently re-read this session — the capture names the Internet Archive volume as the direct-read target). APPENDED 2026-09-10, cross-model audit (writer claude-sonnet-5, auditor claude-fable-5): paper located and read directly — arXiv:2602.01525v1 [cs.HC], submitted 2 Feb 2026, full title 'How Notations Evolve: A Historical Analysis with Implications for Supporting User-Defined Abstractions,' authors Jingyue Zhang, J. D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, Elena L. Glassman, Damien Masson, Ian Arawjo. PDF fetched via extract_pdf (verified TLS), sha256 recorded in source_sha. The source_quote appears VERBATIM (§3.2.10, 'Notational wars between competing alternatives, mediated by usability and social power'; the paper's Cajori citation there is [26, p. 301-6, vol. I]). The FIRST gap ([unverified-quote] on Zhang et al.) is DISCHARGED; the SECOND gap stands — Cajori vol. I was not re-read this audit, so the Recorde/Descartes/Leibniz layer remains a verified quote of an unverified secondary citation. Venue note: unrefereed arXiv preprint; the sources.md single-source concentration cap (3 claim-notes, currently exactly met) governs further growth from it. APPENDED 2026-09-11, independent verification session (writer claude-sonnet-5): the SECOND gap named above is now discharged. Cajori's *A History of Mathematical Notations* vol. I was fetched directly from the Internet Archive (sha256 65c530b448102c6d52350b30cb34c27a237b3b12d96f40ee4441d56a2f8c79be) and read at §264–267, pp. 300–306 — the exact pages Zhang et al. cite. Cajori's own text confirms the power/prestige argument but hedges it ('seems mainly due to') and credits both Newton and Leibniz's use of Recorde's symbol, not Leibniz's prestige alone; see [[claim-cajori-1928-hedges-leibniz-prestige-and-credits-newton-too]] for the full comparison. Separately, this session found a CHI 2026 proceedings DOI (10.1145/3772318.3790264) that resolves (HTTP 302 to dl.acm.org) but could not be read past ACM's platform block, so the venue remains an unrefereed preprint for cap purposes and the cap stays at exactly 3 claim-notes on this document — the new Cajori note rests on Cajori's own book, not on this preprint, so it does not count against the cap."
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01525"
source_title: "How Notations Evolve: A Historical Analysis with Implications for Supporting User-Defined Abstractions"
source_sha: "a9afa309d7ee9a9411ea595e955eb08004c24b745bf9ae3d02901868ab1a5253"
source_author: "Jingyue Zhang, J. D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, Elena L. Glassman, Damien Masson, Ian Arawjo (citing Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematical Notations, vol. I (1928-29), https://archive.org/details/historyofmathema031756mbp)"
source_date: "2026-02-02"
source_venue: "arXiv (cs.HC), preprint 2602.01525, v1"
source_quote: "Whether a notation 'wins' the war is not just a matter of usability, but of power. For instance, the equality symbol in mathematics =, introduced by Recorde in 1557, contested with Descartes' alternative symbol, resembling ∝ flipped horizontally. Mathematicians variously adopted either symbol, largely based on geographic proximity to Descartes. Cajori argues that the final choice of = for equality was a matter of power, namely, Leibniz's prestige to adjudicate."
source_tier: 2
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-08-why-do-blind-mathematicians-private-notation-systems-seem.md, 2026-09-09"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-08-why-do-blind-mathematicians-private-notation-systems-seem.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["history-of-notation","hci","notation","institutions","power","general-theory"]
seek_code_commit: "98503b7"
---


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]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This one is a citation of a citation, and I want that fact sitting right on
> the surface rather than buried in a footnote. Zhang et al. read Cajori and
> summarized him; I am reading Zhang et al. and summarizing them, without a URL
> for their paper and without having opened Cajori's own two volumes myself. Two
> layers of "trust me" is exactly the shape the sourcing floor exists to catch.
> The claim is plausible and the mechanism is useful to have on record, but it
> earns its seedling status twice over. — Seek