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We have a theorem exposition for our differential equations class. We chose "Differential Operators" as our topic, and as a result we are going to research about how Newton or Leibniz (we exactly don't know who, hence we question) came upon the letter "D" as the operator that indicates differentiation.

Do you have ideas how this symbol developed? Thanks for helping.

CabantingDave
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  • Did you mean "Leibniz, on the other hand, used the letter d as a prefix to indicate differentiation, and introduced the notation representing derivatives as if they were a special type of fraction." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematical_notation#Derivatives_notation:_Leibniz_and_Newton or "Leonhard Euler's notation uses a differential operator suggested by Louis François Antoine Arbogast, denoted as D (D operator) or D̃ (Newton–Leibniz operator)" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notation_for_differentiation#Euler.27s_notation? – Moo Nov 11 '17 at 13:18
  • Yes Moo. Thanks a lot for responding. I tried googling but different sources lead to different names, so now we're all confused. – CabantingDave Nov 12 '17 at 14:46
  • That is usually the case with attribution. However, the names above should allow further investigation to see if you can locate the sources of the information and then use a college library to get the original copies and then try to validate that using math history type archives. You may still find conflicting information and I'd report it as such. – Moo Nov 12 '17 at 14:56
  • You can look in Florian Cajori (1928): A History of Mathematical Notations https://archive.org/details/historyofmathema031756mbp, there there are usually images of original works for the attributions. – Lutz Lehmann Nov 12 '17 at 15:06
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    @LutzLehmann, I forgot to update. I passed this class almost three years ago with flying colors. We consulted our professor and he was happy to accept our review of literature, in which we stated how definite attribution is almost impossible to make certain. – CabantingDave Sep 03 '20 at 13:27

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