Joseph Mazur is the author of Euclid in the Rainforest (Plume), which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, as well as The Motion Paradox (Penguin) and What's Luck Got to Do with It? (Princeton). He lives with his wife, Jennifer, in Vermont

Introduction ix Definitions xxi Note on the Illustrations xxiii Part 1 Numerals 1 1. Curious Beginnings 3 2. Certain Ancient Number Systems 10 3. Silk and Royal Roads 26 4. The Indian Gift 35 5. Arrival in Europe 51 6. The Arab Gift 60 7. Liber Abbaci 64 8. Refuting Origins 73 Part 2 Algebra 81 9. Sans Symbols 85 10. Diophantus's Arithmetica 93 11. The Great Art 109 12. Symbol Infancy 116 13. The Timid Symbol 127 14. Hierarchies of Dignity 133 15. Vowels and Consonants 141 16. The Explosion 150 17. A Catalogue of Symbols 160 18. The Symbol Master 165 19. The Last of the Magicians 169 Part 3 The Power of Symbols 177 20. Rendezvous in the Mind 179 21. The Good Symbol 189 22. Invisible Gorillas 192 23. Mental Pictures 210 24. Conclusion 216 Appendix A Leibniz's Notation 221 Appendix B Newton's Fluxion of xn 223 Appendix C Experiment 224 Appendix D Visualizing Complex Numbers 228 Appendix E Quaternions 230 Acknowledgments 233 Notes 235 Index 269

While all of us regularly use basic math symbols such as those for plus, minus, and equals, few of us know that many of these symbols weren't available before the sixteenth century. What did mathematicians rely on for their work before then? And how did mathematical notations evolve into what we know today? In Enlightening Symbols, popular math writer Joseph Mazur explains the fascinating history behind the development of our mathematical notation system. He shows how symbols were used initially, how one symbol replaced another over time, and how written math was conveyed before and after symbols became widely adopted.