Who invented the equals sign?
Two Perfect Lines
Who invented the equals sign?
Look at this: =. Two little lines, perfectly parallel, sitting quietly on the page. You've seen it thousands of times. You write it without thinking. But someone had to invent it. Someone had to look at math — all those numbers and letters sprawling across the page — and say, "You know what this needs? A symbol that means both sides are exactly the same."
The year was 1557. England. A Welsh mathematician named Robert Recorde was writing a math textbook called The Whetstone of Witte. (Yes, that's really what he called it. Books had wild names back then.) He was tired of writing "is equal to" over and over and over. His hand probably cramped. His patience definitely wore thin.
