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.

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 ...

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 ...

To understand why, the team looked at the MRI scans.

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 ...

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.

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 ...