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28 views5 pages

PowerPoint Template 4

Uploaded by

Nel Bornia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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MATHEMATICAL LANGUAGE

AND SYMBOLS

This aim of this chapter is to introduce you to a mathematical way of thinking


that can serve you to a variety of situations. Often when you start work on a
mathematical problem, you may have only a vague sense of how to proceed.
You may begin by looking at examples, drawing pictures, playing around with
notation, rereading the problem to focus on more of its details, and so forth.
The closer you get to a solution, however, the more your thinking has to
crystallize. And the more you need to understand, the more you need
language that expresses mathematical ideas clearly, precisely and
unambiguously.

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INTRODUCTION
Mathematics has its own language, much of which we are already familiar with. For
example, the digits

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

are part of our everyday lives. Whether we refer to 0 as ‘zero’, ‘nothing’, ‘nought’,
or ‘O’ as in a telephone number, we understand its meaning.

There are many symbols in mathematics and most are used as a precise form of
shorthand. We need to be confident when using these symbols, and to gain that
confidence we need to understand their meaning. To understand their meaning
there are two things to help us –

context - this
is the context
in which we
are working, or
the particular
topics being
studied, and

convention -
where
mathematician
s and scientists
have decided
that particular
symbols will
have particular
meaning.

Some common mathematical symbols, Let us look at some symbols commonly


associated with mathematical operations.
The symbol +
Words associated with this symbol are ‘plus’, ‘add’, ‘increase’ and ‘positive’. As
it stands, ‘+’ clearly has some sort of meaning, but we really need to
understand it within a context. So, for example, if we see the + symbol written
in the sum
2+3

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we understand that the context is one of adding the two numbers, 2and 3, to give
5. So here, the symbol + is an instruction to add two numbers together.
Let us look at another context in which we see the + symbol.
If you study telephone numbers on business cards you will often see them given,
for example, as
+44 191 123 4567
In this context, the + symbol means that, in addition to the usual telephone
number, a person dialing that number from overseas will need to include the
country code (in this case 44).
So, we see that the + symbol can have completely different meanings in different
contexts, and it is important to be clear about the context.

The symbol −

Words associated with this symbol are ‘minus’, ‘subtract’, ‘take away’, ‘negative’
and ‘decrease’. Again, to understand the symbol we need a context.
So, if we see the − symbol written in the sum
6−4
we know this means 6 subtract 4, and we know the answer is 2.
In a different context, we might see −5◦C, meaning a temperature of minus five
degrees Celsius, that is five degrees below zero.

The symbol ×

Words associated with this symbol are ‘multiply’, ‘lots of’, and ‘times’.
This is really just a shorthand for adding. For example, if we see
6+6+6+6+6
we have five lots of six, or five sixes, and in our shorthand, we can write this as 5
× 6. Suppose we have
a+a+a+a+a
We might write this expression as 5 × a. However, in this context, especially in
hand-written work, we may confuse the × symbol with the letter x, and so we
would often write simply 5a. We see that our shorthand has become even
shorter. Multiplication is one of those rare occasions when we can omit a symbol
altogether

The division symbols


Division is symbolized in several different ways. For example
10 ÷ 5, 10/5
are three equivalent ways of writing ten divided by 5. We might also read this as
‘how many times will 5 go into 10?’.

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The = sign and its variants
Another symbol used frequently is the equals sign =.
The = sign does not mean anything on its own - we need a context.
For example, in the sum 1+2= 3, what we are saying is that whatever we have
on the left-hand
side is exactly equal to whatever we have on the right-hand side.
Variations on the equals sign are
≠ which means ‘is not equal to’
≈ which means ‘is approximately equal to’
≥ which means ‘is greater than or equal to’,
e.g. x ≥ 2means that x can equal 2, but it might also be any value larger than 2.
≤ which means ‘is less than or equal to’,
e.g. y ≤ 7 means that y might equal 7 or might be any number less than 7.

VARIABLES

Variables are another form of mathematical symbol. These are used when
quantities take different values.
Imagine taking a car journey and think about the speed at which you are
travelling. As you travel along your speed may change. So, speed is a variable -
that is, a quantity which can change. We will be using letters to stand for
quantities like this. For example, we might use the letter v for speed. To a large
extent we can use any letter we choose, although there are conventions.
We might choose to use d for distance and t for time.
By convention, we use u to be an initial speed, and v to be a final speed.
In a different context, v might refer to volume. We need to check the context to
fully understand the meaning.
If we see v = d/t where d = distance, and t = time, then we would know that v is
a speed.
On the other hand, if we see v = 4/3 πr3 where r is the radius of a sphere, we
know that v stands for the volume of the sphere.
Returning to our car journey. We might want to record the journey time on
several different days. In this context we might choose to use a subscript and
write
t1, t2, t3, t4, t5
for the journey times on each of five different days. Alternatively, we could write
tm, tt, tw, th, tf
for the journey times on Monday through to Friday.

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Note how we have used th for the journey time on Thursday to avoid confusion
with tt for the journey time on Tuesday. So, a subscript is a small number, or
other symbol, written to the bottom right of a variable to distinguish different
instances of that variable.

THE GREEK ALPHABET


You will find that Greek letters are used in many calculations.

For example, the Greek letter ‘pi’, written π, is used to represent the number
3.14159.... This number continues forever without repeating.

We often use α (‘alpha’), β (‘beta’), and θ (‘theta’) to represent angles.

The Greek capital letter ‘sigma’ or Σ is frequently used to represent the addition
of several numbers, and you will see it provided for this purpose on the toolbar of
any spreadsheet program.

For future reference the full alphabet is given here:

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