A-Hat

Right now in Math HL, we're learning about vectors. I happen to think it's one of our easier units, as we've looked at them in a fair amount of depth before, even if we are adding on to it significantly. One concept that we need to understand is the idea of unit vectors. You see, the purpose of a vector is to convey both a magnitude, which means distance, speed, strength, etc, and a direction. A unit vector, however, only conveys direction, making the magnitude one. For any given vector a (I couldn't find the character a with the arrow, so I'll settle for bold, there exists a vector â that is in the same direction as a, but with a magnitude of one. This has a few important uses, none of which I'm going to go into now. Anyway, when Ms. Hessler first introduced the concept, she said that "â" should be read as "a-hat." Most of the class went along with it, but I, being an individual thinker, had to pause for a moment. A...hat. That just does not sound like something mathematicians would say. It does, however, sound exactly like something that students would say to get around the fancy fluff that math people like to throw in. So I asked, "Is that its actual name, or is it just something that we make up to avoid the real term?" She showed me a page in our textbook (which, for what it's worth, was written specifically for use with the IB programme) which said specifically, "...which is read as 'a-hat.'" I'm still a bit skeptical...my theory: it's actually called "a-caret" or "a-circumflex" or "Littera-circumflexus," but once, shortly after it was named, the person responsible for taking notes at a conference lost their records of the conference, and didn't speak enough Latin to remember the real name. He jotted down the first thing that came to mind, and, as it turns out, no one had been paying enough attention at the conference to prove him wrong.