“The beauty of symbolic equations is that it’s much easier to ... see a problem at a glance”: How we moved from words and pictures to thinking symbolically

For many, the idea of math will bring back endless hours of formulas and equations at school. So it may seem hard to imagine, but there once was a time when arithmetic didn’t exist. Of course, there was still the need to use complex computations to solve real-world problems, but it wasn’t until Muhammad ibn-­MÅ«sā al-­KhwārizmÄ«, the so-called “father of algebra,” established the fundamentals for solving equations that we began to set the foundations for modern mathematics. In this excerpt from her new book ” Vector: A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation “, mathematician Robyn Arianrhod explores…