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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Mathematics might seem intimidating at first glance, but understanding its symbols is like learning to read a new language, one that opens doors to science, technology, and logical thinking. Whether ...

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.