The abbreviation Maths is said to have been first used in America in 1818 in a letter that referred to a man named Davies as ass. prof. maths.
Then came Math, again in the US, in 1847As recorded in the personal diary of someone by the name W.G. Hammond —“It rained so that we had a math. lesson indoors.” and Math’s in 1854.In some kind of a report card where students were noted to be “deficient in Math’s.”
The first use of an abbreviation for mathematics as Maths in Britain was in 1911.In a letter from by the poet Wilfred Edward Salter Owen where he wrote, “The Answers to Maths. Ques. were given us all this morning.”
While the abbreviations have been existing for over 200 years in written form, it was only in the mid-20th century that people started using them as spoken words.
For quite a while after that, both maths and math were used in spoken English in both the US and the UK.
Then in the 1970s, people in the UK developed a liking for maths and since then, math is considered inappropriate in British English.
The Americans argue that since mathematics is not plural, e.g. we say “My favourite subject is mathematics” and not “My favourite subject are mathematics”, the abbreviation should be math and not maths.
The British argument in favour of maths is that since mathematics ends with an S, the short-form should be maths.
But then, the short form for facsimile is Fax and not Faxie; so, the argument of keeping the last letter intact in the short-form proves invalid.
Some believe that since the word ‘mathematics’ comes from the Greek ‘mathematika’ and Greeks used to put A in the end to denote plurals, the British in the beginning might have taken mathematics as a plural.
However, people now know that mathematics is a mass noun, like sugar — too much sugar is still sugar and not sugars.
So, maths is likely to have stuck with the British more out of a habit than because of a lack of understanding of the plural form or anything else.
