It’s a complaint many algebra teachers are familiar with, as more letters and symbols are introduced with progressively harder courses in mathematics. But why did the plus symbol emerge as the ...

The symbols we use every day have fascinating and surprisingly recent origins, explains author Joseph Mazur in his new book A few years ago friends and I were talking about the origins of written ...

As the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa stressed in his classic book Language in Thought and Action, words are not the things they represent. Words are symbols. It’s the manipulation of those symbols that ...

Before the 16th century, most math equations were written as metered verse. Thank god for graphic-design-inclined mathematicians. The study of mathematics has existed since ancient times.