As is well known, it was only in 1926 that a comprehensive mathematical theory of braids was published—that of Emil Artin. That said, braids had been researched mathematically before Artin’s treatment: Alexandre Theophile Vandermonde, Carl Friedrich Gauß and Peter Guthrie Tait had all attempted to introduce notations for braids. Nevertheless, it was only Artin’s approach that proved to be successful. Though the historical reasons for the success of Artin’s approach are known, a question arises as to whether other approaches to deal with braids existed, approaches that were developed after Artin’s article and were essentially different from his approach. The answer, as will be shown, is positive: Modesto Dedò developed in 1950 another notation for braids, though one, which was afterward forgotten or ignored. This raises a more general question: what was the role of Artin’s notation, or, respectively, Dedò’s, that enabled either the acceptance or the neglect of their theories? More philosophically, can notation be an epistemic technique, prompting new discoveries, or rather, can it also operate an as obstacle? The paper will analyze the method introduced by Dedò to notate braids, and also its history and implications. It aims to show that Dedò, in contrast to Artin, focused on factorizations of braids and the algebraic relations between the operations done on these factorizations. Dedò’s research was done against the background of Oscar Chisini’s research of algebraic curves on the one hand and of Artin’s successful notation of braids on the other hand. Taking this into account, the paper will in addition look into the epistemic role of notation, comparing Dedò’s work with Artin’s, as both presented different notations of braids and their deformations.

中文翻译：

---

如何标记字符串的交叉？莫德斯托·德多 (Modesto Dedò) 的辫子记号

众所周知，直到 1926 年才发表了全面的辫子数学理论——Emil Artin 的理论。也就是说，在 Artin 接受治疗之前，人们已经对辫子进行了数学研究：Alexandre Theophile Vandermonde、Carl Friedrich Gauß 和 Peter Guthrie Tait 都曾尝试引入辫子符号。尽管如此，只有阿廷的方法被证明是成功的。虽然 Artin 方法成功的历史原因是已知的，但问题是是否存在其他处理辫子的方法，这些方法是在 Artin 的文章之后开发的，与他的方法有本质上的不同。正如将要展示的，答案是肯定的：Modesto Dedò 于 1950 年开发了另一种辫子符号，尽管它后来被遗忘或忽略了。这提出了一个更普遍的问题：Artin 的符号或 Dedò 的符号的作用是什么，使得他们的理论要么被接受要么被忽视？从更哲学的角度来看，符号是否可以成为一种认知技术，促使新发现，或者更确切地说，它也可以作为障碍？本文将分析 Dedò 引入的标记辫子的方法，以及它的历史和含义。它旨在表明，与 Artin 相比，Dedò 专注于辫子的因式分解以及对这些因式分解进行的操作之间的代数关系。Dedò 的研究一方面是在 Oscar Chisini 对代数曲线的研究的背景下进行的，另一方面是在 Artin 对辫子的成功表示法的背景下进行的。考虑到这一点，本文还将研究符号的认知作用，将 Dedò 的工作与 Artin 的工作进行比较，