The Nature of Mathematics as a Language

Characteristics of Mathematical Language

People often consider mathematics a difficult subject because they consider the language
of mathematics foreign to them. However, like any language, mathematics has its own symbols,
syntax and rules to understand the expressed ideas, and to communicate ideas with others.

Mathematics is about ideas -- relationships, quantities, processes, ways of figuring out

certain kinds of things, reasoning, and so on. It uses words. When we have ideas, we often want
to talk about them; that is when we need words. Words help us communicate.

The language of mathematics makes it easy to express the kinds of thoughts that
mathematicians like to express. There are three important characteristics of the language of
mathematics. These are precision, conciseness, and powerful.

a. Precision refers to the quality, condition of being exact and accurate.

When an idea is precise you will be able to make fine distinctions. By being precise
when expressing ideas, you remove the probability that other people will not understand
how, and which condition a situation holds true.

For instance, when you state the expression “the set of positive integers”, you are
referring to a particular set of numbers without explaining what these numbers are. This
set of positive integers refers to the numbers {1, 2, 3,…}.

b. Conciseness involves using the most appropriate and minimal amount of effective words
to make one’s point understood.

In the language of mathematics, the definition of a term is concise if it is brief and

to the point. This means that a great deal of the definition is conveyed in just few words
and is generally free of repetition, redundancy, and unnecessary details. To illustrate this
characteristic, let us try to define a term which possesses conciseness.

“A regular pentagon is a polygon with 5 equal sides and angles.” It is

already enough to define a regular pentagon that satisfy the two
conditions (1) has 5 equal sides, and (2) has 5 equal angles. There is no
need to provide more information to say that they have equal sides and
equal angles for a pentagon to be a regular polygon.

c. Powerful. The language of mathematics is considered to be powerful when it is able to

express complex thoughts with relative ease.

The use of mathematics together with a written language provides powerful tools
and aids to human mind. The use of mathematics is important in research studies and
 development of new technologies in the sciences such as in computer programming,
physics, medicine, etc.

The language of mathematics can be learned, but requires dedication needed to

learn any foreign language. Thus, we need to get extensive practice with mathematical
language ideas, to enhance our ability to correctly read, write, speak, and understand
mathematics.

The Grammar of Mathematics

Mathematics has its own grammar, vocabulary, syntax, word order, synonyms and
antonyms, conventions, idioms, abbreviations, negations, and sentence and paragraph structures.
The main reason for the importance of mathematical grammar is that statements of mathematics
are supposed to be precise. Mathematical sentences become highly complex if the parts that
made them up were not clear and simple which makes it difficult to understand.

The grammar of mathematics refers to the structural rules governing the use of symbols
representing mathematical objects.

Some difficulties in mathematics language include the following:

 The word "is" could mean equality, inequality or membership in a set.

 Different uses of a number; to express quantity (cardinal), to indicate the order
(ordinal), and as a label (nominal).
 Mathematical objects may be represented in many ways, such as sets and
functions.
 The words "and' & "or" means different from its English use.

Example 1. Express the following using mathematical symbols

1. 5 is the square root of 25
2. 5 is less than 10
3. 5 is a prime number

It is common in mathematics to use the equal sign (=) when using the word is. For
example, the statement “two plus three is five” can be written in the form “2 + 3 = 5”. Let us go
back to the examples written above. We have the following translations of the statements a, b,
and c using mathematical symbols as follows:

Statement Mathematical Translation

1. 5 is the square root of 25

2. 5 is less than 10
3. 5 is a prime number
 We can observe from the solutions that the equal sign is not necessarily used to express
the second and third statement. Instead, we use other symbols to express correctly these two
statements.