You’ve seen it before.

Maybe you use it all the time.

Maybe you haven’t touched it since high school or college.

But it is likely that, early in your education, the = sign showed up in some nasty column of homework problems. In that context, “=” seems like a prompt for the answer.

Try it yourself. How do you read these?

3+1 = ___

2+4 = ___

7+3 = ___

Chances are, if you’re not trained in math, you read the = sign as a command to fill in the blank.

Even in higher levels of education, the “=” sign is often used as a shorthand for “get the answer”. For example, sin²(x)+cos²(x) = ________ might be posed as a question on a trigonometry test.

A friend (who is starting to explore higher math) asked me about an equation she didn’t understand. After a few minutes of talking, I realized that my friend never learned any meaning to “=” besides “get the answer.” That is simply not what “=” means. And this mistake is more than a harmless misconception. It actually makes higher math impossible to comprehend.

If, as is the case with many people, you never learned what “=” really means, you will never decipher a sentence like this: “There are no solutions to xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ for positive integers x, y, z and n>3.”

Even if you are familiar with algebra, you quickly hit a problem.  Anyone who thinks “=” means “find the answer” will likely turn away. How are you supposed to solve for anything here?

 

Here is where one small idea can open up mathematics for even a self-proclaimed “not math person.” Really, = doesn’t have anything to do with questions or answers at all.

Compare this to an English sentence, like Jennifer ate a hamburger. If Jennifer really ate a hamburger, this sentence is true. If she didn’t, this sentence is false. But either way, it is a grammatically correct sentence.

Now take the phrase, Jennifer. Or, Jennifer ate. Neither of these are complete sentences.

Imagine I told you what Jennifer ate, then gave you a pop quiz: Jennifer ate ______. The implied question here is “fill in the blank so that it makes a true sentence.”

No one would think that “ate” means “get the answer.” In this sentence, “ate” is just the verb.

The verb in this simple English sentence is analogous to the role of = in math. Except that = is probably the most powerful verb in the math vocabulary. When two things are =, that means they are the fundamentally the same. If you would replace one with the other, you’d be saying the exact same thing.

So let’s see = in a math statement. If I say “2+2=17,” I am saying, “2+2 and 17 represent the exact same thing.” This, of course, is not true. But my equation is still “grammatically correct.”

There are many uses for the “verb” = in math. One important use is to take statements about equations and try to prove or disprove them. 2+2=17 can be proven untrue in a few simple steps. The proof of the example with xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ is not as easy. That particular problem took over 300 years of focused effort before anyone solved it!

 

= is really a friendly symbol. It presents two ideas and offers you a chance to see if they match up. It’s something of a pity how it is used on elementary school tests, because that makes people associate it with “right” or “wrong”—a certain way to make you nervous and maybe even hate math. = isn’t about right and wrong. It’s about true or not true. And that is something a person can enjoy.