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 ...

Galileo once famously described the universe as a great book “written in mathematical language and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures.” Unfortunately, it’s a language ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

It has been long thought that one of the characteristics that makes humans unique is our ability to learn and manipulate symbols for communication. However, this notion is starting to slowly unravel.

Jody Nolf is an associate language and literacy specialist at Vista Higher Learning. For more than 20 years, she taught English and reading to middle and high school students. Six years ago, she ...

Anyone who's had to learn math or physics in school may have encountered pi at one point. More popularly known and written out in its Greek lowercase letter counterpart, π, it's essentially the ratio ...