Mathematish – a tacit knowledge of mathematics

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the symbolic notations of mathematics and to present some hypotheses. We will stress the language aspect of the sym-bolic notation system, and therefore we call it “Mathematish”. This definition is of course rather vague, but we try to specify our use of the term in Section 2. There is already a lot of research done about mathematics representations in mathematics education, also using linguistic tools. A short overview is presented in Brown (2001). Also in Nordic mathematics education some research is done in the semiotic field (e.g. Bergsten, 1999; Engström, 2002) and (Winsløv, submit-ted). Despite this our hope is that our approach to consider mathematics symbol-ism as a fully developed language could create some fruitful hypotheses for this field. Our method is a rather speculative reasoning, but with some empirical under-pinnings from the history of mathematics, from our teacher experience, and from findings in mathematics education research. Some of our arguments are sup-ported by references to the philosophical and linguistic fields of knowledge