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 ...

David E. Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-building technology. It’s natural to think of math as being fundamentally abstract. Whether it’s invented or discovered, its ...

squareCircleZ gives examples of situations where students struggle with the way maths is written. The blogger proposes an alternative notation for the way parentheses are used in some functions.