ABSTRACT
Differences between speech and writing – especially with regard to mathematics – are insufficiently distinguished. In this chapter, I suggest the challenges of reading mathematical writing, and even writing mathematics itself, are, currently, perhaps under-focused. Moreover, the relatively recent attempts to broaden the notion of a specific language’s mathematics register has been by expanding it to include other elements of written (and drawn) mathematical symbolism and images, as opposed to including gestures that frequently accompany spoken language (termed ‘paralinguistic’, by linguists). On the one hand, the notion of ‘the mathematics register’ is used widely, with seldom any acknowledgement that there are many, due to the many natural languages inside which they exist. On the other hand, any description of mathematics as ‘a (the) universal language’, referring to ‘the’ mathematics register, suggests its singularity – or even uniqueness.
