Quotition
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This article may be confusing or unclear to readers. Please help clarify the article; suggestions may be found on the talk page. (April 2007) |
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It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Division (mathematics). (Discuss) Proposed since February 2010. |
Quotition is an arithmetic concept that concerns how we look at fractions and division. The key to quotition problem statements is the phrase "how many are in."
Division involves thinking about a whole in terms of its parts. One frequent division notion, a natural number of equal parts, is known as partition to educators. The basic concept behind partition is sharing. In sharing a whole entity becomes an integer number of equal parts. What quotition concerns is explained by removing the word integer in the last sentence. Allow number to be any fraction and you have quotition instead of partition.
A University of Melbourne web page [1] shows what to do when the fraction is a ratio of integers or rational.
[edit] Etymology
From a dictionary definition [2] of a related word in physics, quotidian, the phrase "how many" is from the word's origins: "Middle English cotidien, from Old French, from Latin qutdinus, from qutdi, each day : quot, how many, as many as".
