wikipedia tells me it is because S stands for the latin word summa. | Hacker News

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		tedunangst on Jan 2, 2011 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: The rules for using "ſ" (long s) wikipedia tells me it is because S stands for the latin word summa.

ludwigvan on Jan 2, 2011 [–]

Exactly.(Riemann) integral is summation with infinitesimal quantities. (It was Leibniz who used long s to denote integration, though. http://jeff560.tripod.com/calculus.html ) Also, for discrete summation, capital 's'igma is used.

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