In science, a formula is a concise way of expressing information symbolically, as in a mathematical formula or a chemical formula. The informal use of the term formula in science refers to the general construct of a relationship between given quantities.
One of the most influential figures of computing science's founding generation, Edsger Dijkstra at the blackboard during a conference at ETH Zurich in 1994. In Dijkstra's own words, "A picture may be worth a thousand words, a formula is worth a thousand pictures."
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics with the major subdisciplines of number theory, algebra, geometry, and analysis, respectively. There is no general consensus among mathematicians about a common definition for their academic discipline.
This is the Ulam spiral, which illustrates the distribution of prime numbers. The dark diagonal lines in the spiral hint at the hypothesized approximate independence between being prime and being a value of a quadratic polynomial, a conjecture now known as Hardy and Littlewood's Conjecture F.
On the surface of a sphere, Euclidean geometry only applies as a local approximation. For larger scales the sum of the angles of a triangle is not equal to 180°.
The Babylonian mathematical tablet Plimpton 322, dated to 1800 BC
A page from al-Khwārizmī's Algebra
