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 ...

A new book traces the history of division signs, square roots, pi, exponents, graph axes and other mathematical symbols. (Bigstock) Consider the simple plus sign: +. Most people, Joseph Mazur writes ...

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.

Mazur (Euclid in the Rainforest) gives readers the fascinating history behind the mathematical symbols we use, and completely take for granted, every day. Mathematical notation turns numbers into ...

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 ...

Many mathematical communications assume that everyone understands the characters used, is familiar with mathematical syntax, and knows the difference between the terms used, for example, between ...