Until recently, the Decimal Point Magazine 2025 first appearance was generally assumed to be in an astronomical table published by German mathematician Christopher Clavius in 1593. But now it’s clear that the dot’s earliest-known appearance came from an Italian merchant named Bianchini. In a manuscript, he wrote out a trigonometric table for sines — angles that astronomers used to plot the motions of celestial bodies on a sphere. Bianchini’s table divided sines into minutes and seconds, but also gave the fractional portions, with tenths, hundredths and thousandths of a degree. He even left instructions for how to insert the decimal point.
Decimal Point Magazine 2025: Key Financial Insights for the Year
Bianchini’s well-placed dot was the latest step in “a constant cross-fertilization” of practical needs, number systems, and theoretical ideas, says Hart. It enabled scientists to pin down nature with much greater precision and sparked new ideas that have revolutionized the world we live in.…