There is a beautiful and well-established logogram for "and" that is known to virtually every more or less educated person in the world - it's the ampersand '&'. It's completely unambiguous, as opposed to logical disjunction (I'm talking about its inclusive and exclusive versions).
Why is the ampersand not used universally to denote logical conjunction?
The best answer I can come up with is because actually drawing the symbol takes a bit of knack. However, there are two reasons this is not an answer:
- Drawing Greek letters takes quite a bit of knack as well, and they are all over the place in mathematics and logic.
There are handwritten variations of the ampersand that are extremely easy to draw.
Is using '$\wedge$' for logical conjunction just a historical accident?
P.S. I was of course lying when I said the ampersand is not used universally, as I have seen it used here and there, and I use it myself in my own writing.
In older books (certainly up to about 1960) it is not unusual to see conjunction notated
&, and there are still authors and fields that use it. (Consider for example linear logic which has two different conjunctions notated $\otimes$ and $\&$, and eschews the $\land$ symbol completely).Jeff Miller's excellent Earliest Uses of Various Mathematical Symbols lists $\land$ as having been invented by Heyting in 1930. By then, $\lor$ for disjunction had already been in use for for decades -- it was apparently invented by Russell in 190x and used in Principia Mathematica.
Heyting's motivation for $\land$ may have been to stress the duality between $\lor$ and $\land$, or to call out the parallel between $\land,\lor$ and $\cap,\cup$ in set theory (which were introduced by Peano as early as 1888).
The new notation became popular enough that when ASCII was invented in the early 1960s, the primary motivation for including a
\character seems to have been that then matching $\land$ and $\lor$ symbols could be created in computer printouts as/\and\/.