Lesson 1: The Nature of Mathematics as a Language

In this lesson, you will be introduced to a mathematical way of

thinking that can serve you in a wide variety of situations. In dealing with
any situation, you need to understand and use a language to express your
ideas.
Source: google.com

Characteristics of Mathematical Language

People often consider mathematics a difficult subject matter because they consider the
language of mathematics as foreign to them. However, like any language, mathematics has
its own symbols, syntax and rules to understand the expressed ideas and to communicate
ideas to 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
ideas are elsewhere.
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.
1. Precision refers to the quality, condition of being exact and accurate. When an idea is
precise you will be able to make very 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, ,,, }.
2. 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 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.
3. 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 used in research studies and development of new technologies in the sciences such as in
computer programming, physics, medicine, etc.
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The language of mathematics can be learned, but requires the efforts needed to learn any
foreign language. Thus, we need to get extensive practice with mathematical language ideas,
to enhance the 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 math 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

a. 5 is the square root of 25
b. 5 is less than 10
c. 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 illustrations above. We have the following translations of the statements a,
b and c using mathematical symbols as follows:
a. 5 = t
b. 5 < 10
c. 5 P
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.

Exercise 2. 1. Describe the error in the following:

a. 5 is a subset of N
b. x > 1 and x < 4 is equivalent to x > 1< 4
c. Given the function x +10, find the value of f(4)
d. 0, 1, 2, 3, … are elements of counting numbers
e. 22/7 = 3.14