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 ...

The letter “x” often symbolizes something unknown, with an air of mystery that can be appealing. Illustration by Meilan Solly Even though “x” is one of the least-used letters in the English alphabet, ...

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

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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 ...

To begin to understand what mathematicians and physicists see in the abstract structures of symmetries, let’s start with a familiar shape. We are fond of saying things are symmetric, but what does ...