In essence, mathematics is a language. Like any language, it allows you to express concepts that are in your mind. Just like the symbol “TREE” invokes a concept in your mind (with branches and leaves) mathematical symbols also allow you to express many kinds of concepts that exist in your mind. If you can imagine it in your mind, you can devise a symbol to express it. The best part of math is being able to use pure imagination to express all sorts of concepts you form in your mind with symbols you can write down such as “1”, “2”, “3”,”x”, “y”, “z”, etc.

The whole trick to learning math is to understand the concepts behind the symbols people use to express them. This requires that you use your immense power of imagination to capture these concepts. Relax, there really are only a few basic concepts behind the language of math. Even small children can learn them. I will explain some of these concepts to you in this Math Moments Series. What you make out of them can become very interesting.

The real fun in math comes when you realize that you can manipulate (play with) these symbols to form new concepts. These new concepts then become part of your reality. For example, physicists (like me) can use these concepts to better measure and understand how atoms behave. These are the concepts we need to create electricity, motors, cars, computers, and tons of other very useful things in our world.

Mathematics is, in fact, the language of physics…and physics is the study of everything that exists. This language is not really that difficult to learn, you are even allowed to make up symbols to mean almost anything you can think of. Learning this wonderful language is really worth it.