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 ...

Mastering mathematical symbols is essential for success in various fields, from science to technology. The article breaks down fundamental symbols like arithmetic operations, comparisons, variables, ...

Statistically, the most common symbol in mathematics is the equal sign, which appears in 94% of mathematical expressions.

Malinda Evans spends about an hour and a half each day teaching mathematics to her 5th graders at Navajo Elementary School in the working-class South Valley neighborhood of Albuquerque, N.M. Whether ...

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 ...

Scarlett Howard received funding from the Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship and is currently funded by the Fyssen Foundation. Adrian Dyer receives funding from the ...

Say what you will about the universality of numbers and symbols; I’d politely argue that it does not follow that mathematics is a universal language. The problem for many struggling math students is ...

What allows humans to infer “a notion of structure” (Otto Jespersen) when using language, art, music, and mathematics? All of these domains have their own unique representational units (words, notes), ...