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.

The symbols we use every day have fascinating and surprisingly recent origins, explains author Joseph Mazur in his new book A few years ago friends and I were talking about the origins of written ...

Kids with math learning disabilities process number symbols differently than quantities shown as dots — and it shows up in ...

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 ...

An ancient Indian manuscript full of mathematical calculations has been found to be the earliest recorded use of the number “zero.” Bodleian Libraries Researchers are challenging a claim that an ...

Monkeys can use symbols to add, researchers have found. Experts say the discovery could give new insight into the evolutionary origins of our ability to count. The found rhesus monkeys can not only ...