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 ...

It’s a complaint many algebra teachers are familiar with, as more letters and symbols are introduced with progressively harder courses in mathematics. But why did the plus symbol emerge as the ...

Now our new study shows that honeybees too can learn to match symbols and numerosities, much like we humans do with Arabic and Roman numerals. Language is the ability to learn and use a system of ...

Most children learn that written numbers represent quantities in pre-school or junior primary school. Now our new study shows that honeybees, too, can learn to match symbols and numerosities, much ...

Malinda Evans spends about an hour and a half each day teaching mathematics to her 5th graders at Navajo Elementary School in the working-class South Valley neighborhood of Albuquerque, N.M. Whether ...

What allows humans to infer “a notion of structure” (Otto Jespersen) when using language, art, music, and mathematics? All of these domains have their own unique representational units (words, notes), ...

Kutchinsky’s Egg: A Family’s Story of Obsession, Love, and Loss The inaugural winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, this debut collection from Gleason contains enlightening and beautifully written ...

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 ...

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.