Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Reverse Polish Notation
Reverse Polish Notation is a notation in which the operators follow the operands (postfix operators). Hewlett-Packard calculators support this for data entry which makes complex calculations a lot easier to do. But why is this called Reverse "Polish" Notation? Where does Poland come into this? So-called Polish Notation (using prefix operators as in Lisp) was invented in the 1920's by Polish mathematician Jan Lukasiewicz. In the 1950s, Charles L. Hamblin proposed a scheme in which operators followed operands. He called it Reverse Polish Notation. Why wasn't the scheme called Reverse Lukasiewicz Notation? Probably because most non-Slavic speakers can't pronounce Lukasiewicz. (It's pronounced Wu-cash-ay-vich). Clearly Lukasiewicz was robbed. 
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