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 ...

Professor Raúl Rojas has published a book about how symbols have been used throughout history in mathematics. The work was ...

Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology have developed MathDeck, an online search interface that allows anyone to easily create, edit and lookup sophisticated math formulas on the computer.

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 ...

A new study challenges the common practice in many classrooms of teaching mathematical concepts by using "real-world," concrete examples. Researchers found that college students who learned a ...

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.

For her pioneering work in computer science, Grace Murray Hopper ’30 M.A., ’34 Ph.D. has been dubbed the “queen of code” by her biographers. Yet, beneath that crown was the brain of a mathematician, ...

It has long been a mystery why pure math can reveal so much about the nature of the physical world. Antimatter was discovered in Paul Dirac’s equations before being detected in cosmic rays. Quarks ...

For much of her teaching career, Carrie Stark relied on math games to engage her students, assuming they would pick up concepts like multiplication by seeing them in action. The kids had fun, but the ...