Formal symbol for the integer division operation

The integer division is a common and useful operation in Computer Science. It comes up in many domains, as in the manipulation of matrices and grids.

Is there any formal symbol for this operation? Or at least a widely recognisable symbol that can be easily differentiated from the standard division (i.e. inverse of multiplication)?


$\lfloor a/b \rfloor$ (@barakmanos comment suggestion's) is probably the only formal way to express this, without creating new definitions.

Alternatively, you could follow @Henry 's suggestion to explicitly define a symbol to do the integer division operation. The common ones are \ (backslash, as opposed to / forward slash used for regular division), or div.

The advantages of using $\lfloor a/b \rfloor$ are that:

  1. you don't need a new definition
  2. you often need to combine integer division with +1 for various indexing problems. This can be easily achieved with $\lceil a/b \rceil = \lfloor a/b \rfloor + 1$ (edit:) for $a/b \notin \mathbb{Z}$

The edit suggested in the comment (@Tonyk) arguably invalidates the second advantage, since $a/b$ will likely also be an integer in indexing problems. I would personally still prefer the $\lfloor a/b \rfloor$ notation, simply for the first point.


I often use $\text{div}$, which is complementary with $\text{mod}$.

There are many alternatives (some used in programming languages) such as $/,//,\backslash,\div,\%$ but these don't go without saying.

Also $\left\lfloor\dfrac\cdot\cdot\right\rfloor$.