The Language of Mathematics: The Stories Behind the Symbols

A marvelous compendium of mathematical symbols and their fascinating histories

Galileo famously wrote that the book of nature is written in mathematical language. The Language of Mathematics is a wide-ranging and beautifully illustrated collection of short, colorful histories of the most commonly used symbols in mathematics, providing readers with an engaging introduction to the origins, evolution, and conceptual meaning of each one.

In dozens of lively and informative entries, Raúl Rojas shows how today’s mathematics stands on the shoulders of giants, mathematicians from around the world who developed mathematical notation through centuries of collective effort. He tells the stories of such figures as al-Khwārizmī, René Descartes, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Karl Weierstrass, Sofia Kovalevskaya, David Hilbert, and Kenneth Iverson. Topics range from numbers and variables to sets and functions, constants, and combinatorics. Rojas describes the mathematical problems associated with different symbols and reveals how mathematical notation has sometimes been an accidental process. The entries are self-contained and can be read in any order, each one examining one or two symbols, their history, and the variants they may have had over time.

An essential companion for math enthusiasts, The Language of Mathematics shows how mathematics is a living and evolving entity, forever searching for the best symbolism to express relationships between abstract concepts and to convey meaning.

Raúl Rojas is professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Nevada, Reno, and professor emeritus of computer science and mathematics at the Free University of Berlin. A world-renowned expert in artificial intelligence, he is the author of the seminal book Neural Networks and the editor (with Ulf Hashagen) of The First Computers.