ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Modern Arabic mathematical notation

Okay kiddo, imagine you have a plate of cookies and you want to share them with your friends. You need to write down how many cookies each of your friends will get, right? That's where math comes in.

Now, let's talk about how grown-ups write math. In the Arab world a long time ago, people used to write math in something called "Abjad numerals," which were based on letters of the Arabic alphabet. But today, like in many other places in the world, we use modern mathematical notation.

Modern Arabic mathematical notation is a fancy way of writing math equations on a piece of paper using symbols and letters that represent numbers and operations. For example, the symbol "+" means addition, "-" means subtraction, "x" means multiplication, and "/" means division.

We use numbers too, like "0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9" and these numbers can be used to represent any number of cookies we want. For instance, if you have 10 cookies and you want to share them equally between you and your best friend, you would write "10 ÷ 2" (which means "divide 10 by 2" or "share 10 cookies equally between 2 people"). That would give you and your friend 5 cookies each!

So, in a nutshell, modern Arabic mathematical notation is the way we write math so we can easily understand and solve problems like sharing cookies with our friends!