Natural Blogarithms

I was wrong. In class this morning, I seemed have fabricated a memory. I could have sworn that somewhere in either reading or my many math classes over the years that I was taught the name of the components of a subtraction problem. We most all still remember the names of the parts of a division problems, namely the dividend, divisor and quotient.

I thought I knew that in the problem:

That A as the subtractend, B was the subtractor and C was the difference. Well, C is correct, but the other two are WRONG!

Thanks to a student in class this morning, who learned this from homeschool curriculum, the correct name for A is the minuend and B is the subtrahend. After verifying this from several sources, I have this to say: Way to go, homeschoolers!

Some Sources: Mathworld and American Heritage Dictionary

And by the way, apparently I just made up my answers because according to Google, there are a total of two websites on the face of the earth that have the two words subtractor and subtractend. (Make that three, if this is ever indexed by Google)

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