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um.. well i duble click the block then put different numbers in it & after a while i new what they meant. the hardesnt bit would be 'why are they called x & y'. i still havent figured that out. 

Actually Mick's question is quite interesting. Why did we choose X and Y and not A and B?  Natalie was also trying to find a an answer for this and from what I remember she found that the decision was made by one of the people who was printing one of the first books about coordinates (hundreds of years ago) because it was easier for the printing process to use those two letters. Something like that. 

It's interesting that we always tend to accept this kind of facts without thinking why they happened this way.

Yep: Rene Descartes used those letters first in his 1637 book "The Geometry," which you can browse through for free on Google Books. Interestingly, he also came up with idea of using a superscript to indicate an exponent, and the famous phrase "I think, therefore I am." Also, he's famous for sleeping really late. I suspect that he chose lowercase x and y because, if you look at the text of the book, he had already used capital A and B for points defining line segments (which of course we still do in high school), and probably wanted to use much different letters for the distances from the axes (i.e., lower case, and much farther along in the alphabet). JMHO, though...

ElMikkino wrote:

andresmh wrote:

Actually Mick's question is quite interesting. Why did we choose X and Y and not A and B?  Natalie was also trying to find a an answer for this and from what I remember she found that the decision was made by one of the people who was printing one of the first books about coordinates (hundreds of years ago) because it was easier for the printing process to use those two letters. Something like that. 

It's interesting that we always tend to accept this kind of facts without thinking why they happened this way.

X and Y sound cooler  .

No it is because X means horizontal or to the side, Y means Vertical or in up and down and if there was a Z it would be Diagonal

Last edited by nicolasx (2007-11-12 14:57:42)

nicolasx wrote:

ElMikkino wrote:

andresmh wrote:

Actually Mick's question is quite interesting. Why did we choose X and Y and not A and B?  Natalie was also trying to find a an answer for this and from what I remember she found that the decision was made by one of the people who was printing one of the first books about coordinates (hundreds of years ago) because it was easier for the printing process to use those two letters. Something like that. 

It's interesting that we always tend to accept this kind of facts without thinking why they happened this way.

X and Y sound cooler  .

No it is because X means horizontal or to the side, Y means Vertical or in up and down and if there was a Z it would be Diagonal

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I was joking  .

nicolasx wrote:

No it is because X means horizontal or to the side, Y means Vertical or in up and down and if there was a Z it would be Diagonal

Z isn't diagonal, Z is the third dimension. When you look right-left, that'll be X, up-down is Y and right in front is Z. 
I found about X and Y a long time ago, when I tried, and failed miserably, to use 3dsmax.