War in Europe is a staple topic in the study of history, but there’s one major conflict most history books won’t teach you: the battle of the equal sign, =. These two parallel lines were, in fact, the ...

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 ...

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 ...

The study of mathematics has existed since ancient times. Multiplication tables and other math exercises have been found carved into Babylonian tablets from some 3,700 years ago. But the symbols that ...

Statistically, the most common symbol in mathematics is the equal sign, which appears in 94% of mathematical expressions. Almost 60% of statements deploy parentheses. Numbers take up only 13% of the ...

Excerpted with permission from Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by Max Tegmark. Available from Random House/Knopf. Copyright ...