![Historic PORTRAIT OF TEACHER SMILING](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/kUysrFTiiq5MdkAL2sRdyM-320-80.jpg)
'The beauty of symbolic equations is that it's much easier to … see a problem at a glance': How we moved from words and pictures to thinking symbolically
"Even the +, −, =, and × signs we take for granted only came into widespread use in the 17th century. Which means that the earlier algebraists we know of … all had expressed their equations mostly in words or pictorial word images"