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 ...

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 ...

Statistically, the most common symbol in mathematics is the equal sign, which appears in 94% of mathematical expressions. Almost 60% of statements deploy parentheses. Numbers take up only 13% of the ...

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.