The plus and minus signs (+ and −) are mathematical symbols used to represent the notions of positive and negative as well as the operations of addition and subtraction. Their use has been extended to many other meanings, more or less analogous. Plus and minus are Latin terms meaning "more" and "less", respectively.
Though the signs now seem as familiar as the alphabet or the Hindu-Arabic numerals, they are not of great antiquity. The Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for addition, for example, resembled a pair of legs walking in the direction in which the text was written (Egyptian could be written either from right to left or left to right), with the reverse sign indicating subtraction:
Nicole Oresme's manuscripts from the 14th century show what may be one of the earliest uses of the plus sign "+".
In Europe in the early 15th century the letters "P" and "M" were generally used. The symbols (P with line p̄ for più, i.e., plus, and M with line m̄ for meno, i.e., minus) appeared for the first time in Luca Pacioli’s mathematics compendium, Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità, first printed and published in Venice in 1494. The + is a simplification of the Latin "et" (comparable to the ampersand &). The − may be derived from a tilde written over m when used to indicate subtraction; or it may come from a shorthand version of the letter m itself. In his 1489 treatise Johannes Widmann referred to the symbols − and + as minus and mer (Modern German mehr; "more"): "was − ist, das ist minus, und das + ist das mer".
Minus usually refers to the minus sign, a mathematical symbol.
Minus may also refer to:
Minus or M-nus is a recording label based in Berlin, Germany and Windsor, Canada. It was created in 1998 by Richie Hawtin when Plus 8, a label previously created by Hawtin, was put on hold. By 2005, M-nus was releasing 2 to 3 CDs and 12 to 14 records per year.
As Hawtin said of the scaling down to a smaller label, "You learn better who you are, what you are, and how to better present that and present it creatively. With Minus, we wanted to slow it down and try new things…" In 2011 Hawtin's music technology company Liine released Remiix Minus, a remix-app for iOS which enables fans to recombine loops and samples from Minus artists.
DotGNU is a decommissioned part of the GNU Project that aims to provide a free software replacement for Microsoft's .NET Framework by Free Software Foundation. Other goals of the project are better support for non-Windows platforms and support for more processors.
The main goal of the DotGNU project code base was to provide a class library that is 100% Common Language Specification (CLS) compliant.
DotGNU Portable.NET, an implementation of the ECMA-335 Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), includes software to compile and run Visual Basic .NET, C#, and C applications that use the .NET base class libraries, XML, and Windows Forms. Portable.NET claims to support various instruction set architectures including x86, PPC, ARM, and SPARC.
phpGroupWare, a multi-user web-based GroupWare suite, which also serves to provide a collection of webservice components that can be accessed through XML-RPC so that can easily integrate them into webservice applications.
The wildebeests, also called gnus or wildebai, are a genus of antelopes, Connochaetes. They belong to the family Bovidae, which includes antelopes, cattle, goats, sheep and other even-toed horned ungulates. Connochaetes includes two species, both native to Africa: the black wildebeest, or white-tailed gnu (C. gnou); and the blue wildebeest, or brindled gnu (C. taurinus). Fossil records suggest these two species diverged about one million years ago, resulting in a northern and a southern species. The blue wildebeest remained in its original range and changed very little from the ancestral species, while the black wildebeest changed more in order to adapt to its open grassland habitat in the south. The most obvious way of telling the two species apart are the differences in their colouring and in the way their horns are oriented.
In East Africa, the blue wildebeest is the most abundant big game species and some populations perform an annual migration to new grazing grounds but the black wildebeest is merely nomadic. Breeding in both takes place over a short period of time at the end of the rainy season and the calves are soon active and are able to move with the herd. Nevertheless, some fall prey to large carnivores. Wildebeest often graze in mixed herds with zebra which gives heightened awareness of potential predators. They are also alert to the warning signals emitted by other animals such as baboons. Wildebeest are a tourist attraction but compete with domesticated livestock for pasture and are sometimes blamed by farmers for transferring diseases and parasites to their cattle. Some illegal hunting goes on but the population trend is fairly stable and some populations are in national parks or on private land. The IUCN lists both species as being of "least concern".
GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU Project.
GNU or gnu may also refer to: