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 ...

Infinity in mathematics is considered as a number and represented as ∞. It is an endlessness and limitless concept which describes something without any bound or larger than any number. Sometimes it ...

And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac: December 3, 1616, 401 years ago today -- a big day for mathematics ... a very, VERY big day. For that day saw the birth in England of John Wallis, the ...

There are some things that we use every day without realising that someone created them. Take mathematical symbols. “+” was first introduced by Nicole Oresme in 1360, “×” by William Oughtred in 1618, ...

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 ...

The famous mathematical ratio, estimated to more than 22 trillion digits (and counting), is the perfect symbol for our species’ long effort to tame infinity. By Steven Strogatz This article, ...