When was the equals sign first used

Recorde's symbol didn't catch on at first. The language of Latin still held sway during the 16th century. Latin had a word for the concept, "aequalis," and if more concision was necessary, people could shorten it to "ae" or "oe.

In combination, these signs allowed people to express, quickly and with a minimum of wasted ink, a mathematical equation in symbols. At first glance, this makes Robert Recorde an excellent trivia game topic, but not much more.

John V. Tucker, a professor of computer science at Swansea University and an avid researcher of computability theory, argues that Recorde is far more significant than his reputation suggests. Computing is largely about collecting, creating, and processing data. It is universal and ubiquitous because it is intimate with the world's work To understand the history of computing, we may follow the data, which leads us to practical mathematics and to writers such as Recorde.

Tucker believes that Recorde introduced Britain to the concepts of quantification and data in ways that were unfamiliar and world-changing. His instruction on how to apply mathematics to areas such as commerce, land surveying, navigation, and astronomy imposed a new mindset on people who would previously have talked about quantity in vague terms such as "a goodlie amount and a fair distance.

Recorde also, it is clear, ushered in a new way of talking about numbers. Picking and choosing from Latin and German texts , he introduced English speakers to words like "linear," "denominate," "binomial," and "equation. His most famous invention is still part of this computational language. Sadly, Recorde wasn't lauded as a hero of rationality and math education in his lifetime.

Recorde was born in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in He attended Oxford and Cambridge universities and then is believed to have taught at both venues before relocating to London, where he practiced medicine. Some accounts hold that Recorde was a personal doctor to royalty, but this has been disputed. Either way, he authored a medical work called The Urinal of Physick , which instructed readers on how to make a diagnosis by observing a given sample of urine.

Now an obsolete tract, it might be considered a minor classic in the genre of urological literature. He also became a popular author of mathematical books.

They were written in the English vernacular, as opposed to the Latin that most scholarly works especially scientific and mathematical ones were published in at the time. His endeavor, The Ground of Artes , was, in its time, his most popular work. Even brilliant minds can be hit or miss. In addition to math and medicine, Recorde was a fine scholar of classical and medieval documents.

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