Mantissa - word of the week
This word cropped up the other day as it is the name of a song by Mahogany as reviewed in the esteemed Critical Mass blog last week. I first encountered it in the maths class of Mr McDonald as it was some part of a logrithm if I remember. What I liked about it was the sound and so aged twelve I decided that it should have "my favourite word" status. Neglected since then apart from a couple of fleeting mentions in my life, I have restored some of its status by awarding it "word of the week". According to Wikipedia, its archaic, non-mathematical meaning is "a small or worthless supplement". I like it for that reason as well.
ps I apologise if you have arrived here from Google or some other search engine hoping to learn something about maths. I suppose that the person who did a search on "tauten" was disappointed too.
