In
mathematics,
division by two or
halving has also been called
mediation or
dimidiation. The treatment of this as a different operation from multiplication and division by other numbers goes back to the ancient Egyptians, whose
multiplication algorithm used division by two as one of its fundamental steps. Some mathematicians as late as the sixteenth century continued to view halving as a separate operation, and it often continues to be treated separately in modern
computer programming. Performing this operation is simple in
decimal arithmetic, in the
binary numeral system used in computer programming, and in other even-numbered
bases.