this readily shows that it's not about triangles, but some sort of binary tree, because / or * do not operate on the same domain. One is a special case of the other, or an extension.
a bifurcation or whatchamacallit.
The triangle just captures that there are three quantities involved (with any two determining the third). I don't know what you mean with references to bifurcations and binary trees and so on.
If the mention of different domains is about the fact that you can't divide by zero, sure; in the same way, we find problems taking the logarithm of zero, or raising zero to negative powers, with uniquely pinning down roots of negative numbers, etc. For now, I am glossing over these things; let us suppose, for example, that in the ternary relation a * b = c, I intend all quantities to be drawn from some multiplicative group (thus, nonzero, and thus, with any two determining the third).
> If the mention of different domains is about the fact that you can't divide by zero
> I intend all quantities to be drawn from some multiplicative group
That's it. Still, I was trying to draw some hierarchical network, where log and root are both inverses of exp.
In the same way, multiplication is a special case of addition. Although It might not have to be, if it's just my preference to look at it that way. It reminds me of the diamond dependency problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_problem#The_diamond_pr...).
Multiplicative groups to me look like a special case, too. The arrow diagrams look like category theory. I on the other hand just talk from intuition and my experience with the elementary functions, the order I learned in school.
EDIT: Subtraction and division as well aren't associative, so do they really form a subgroup? Another problem besides needlessly complicated notation is ambiguous notation. Wikipedia lists two alternatives for multiplicative groups. One is a special case of a ring which does have a null element. Now, in c/b=a, c can be the null element, but then a would be too, so c/a=b is still undefined. I'd guess that holds for the non-commutative version as well.
In all of these cases, a triangular notation is apt for expressing and emphasizing the structure that any two arguments fix the third.
That having been said, that is all the triangular notation does; it does not help with any further structure that may be around for that particular relation (e.g., rules like a^(b * c) = (a^b)^c, which the triangular notation does little to simplify, though perhaps further notational choices could make these also immediate and clear). Still, when that ternary structure is what one cares to emphasize (and why shouldn't it often be of interest?), one should go ahead and emphasize it.