A few years ago I was idly thumbing through old books at a used store. Looking over a remedial arithmetic book, I was surprised to find that they referred to ze

A few years ago I was idly thumbing through old books at a used store. Looking over a remedial arithmetic book, I was surprised to find that they referred to zero as “the cipher”. Exponentiation and the process of finding a square root were “involution” and “evolution”, respectively. My math education was pretty ad-hoc (complicated story), so maybe these are better known than I realize, but I’ve never heard them. I ended up grabbing the book just for the vocabulary. These examples are just the ones that jumped out most in the first couple of pages.