A Little Dotty? * is an Artifact

Dan, " Hmmm, I always assumed the plate read: M . Million Sometimes a dot is used to indicate multiplication. "Monsieur" is often abbreviated to "M." " You're right, of course. I would actually have preferred to more correctly use a "bullet" dot floating at mid-line height for this, but of course the email character set wouldn't support it, so far as I know. But that's how I envisioned what Number Five sees. His hungover revelation comes when he realizes that the dot is not a period but a dot at half-height in the line of text. I tried to approximate it with an asterisk, which of course is also used as a multiplication sign, esp. in most programming languages. BTW I apologize to all for my mishap last couple of posts; I didn't realize my new email software defaulted to HTML.

I just got back from a business trip to England, where I saw people use a dot, not at half-height in the line, but at the bot- tom of the line (just like a punctuation period), to indicate mul- tiplication. Whether this is also customary in France, or among Francophone mathematicians, I can't say, but it seems possible. Mark Millman