Roots: All Things Being Equal By Emma Bell Analysis

I enjoyed the article “Roots: All things being equal” of Emma Bell because it explains the invention of a common symbol that we use everyday, in math, usually, without paying attention. We use different symbols in our daily life and we consider them an obvious acquisition, even if one day these symbols, in the past, they didn’t exist. Their invention and their simplicity to use them significantly improved the quality of our life, making understanding and writing easier. The style of this article is very attractive because the author describes the invention of the symbol equal in a simple but precise way. Also the author gives us a general background of the story, making the article more immersive and giving us a complete view of the scene giving also the cause to the invention of a determined symbol. In fact in the article the author tells us that the symbol was invented in order to save time and ink and without repeating the phrase “is equal to” in every equation of the book. The inventor of this brilliant symbol is Robert Recorde, a Tudor mathematician and doctor who published widely on a variety of topics. He was born in Tenby, Wales around 1510, and died in Southwark in 1558 in prison for not paying a fine. The idea of the equal symbol had a simple but genial logic; in geometry two parallel lines are perfectly equal, so it’s the best way to represent equality, avoiding

The invention of the equal symbol strongly contributed to increase this international understanding, this is the reason why Robert Recorde gave a significant contribution to the development of mathematics and its development. This is because eliminating the language barriers is very important in order to make the ideas of any mathematician be understood in the entire world and in the scientific community without any limitations, making communications and passage of ideas easier and