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 ...

Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-building technology. It’s natural to think of math as being ...

Mazur (Euclid in the Rainforest) gives readers the fascinating history behind the mathematical symbols we use, and completely take for granted, every day. Mathematical notation turns numbers into ...

A new book traces the history of division signs, square roots, pi, exponents, graph axes and other mathematical symbols. (Bigstock) Consider the simple plus sign: +. Most people, Joseph Mazur writes ...

The use of '=' to mean 'equals' is one of those minor advances in mathematics that we take for granted. It's so small that we don't really think about it. But Joseph Mazur, the author of Enlightening ...

THE first volume of this invaluable work was noticed in our columns on July 6, 1929, p. 4. The vast quantity of material which had to be digested constrained the author to divide it into two volumes, ...

THE invention of the decimal notation, which involves the use of zero and the assignment of local value to digits, made such an immense alteration in the character of arithmetical calculations that it ...

As I told my class on Thursday, the theme of the first week of our math history course was “easy algebra is hard in base 60.” We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to understand ...

Before the 16th century, most math equations were written as metered verse. Thank god for graphic-design-inclined mathematicians.