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You are at a store that is having a sale. In the sale, if you buy two of anything, you get the third for half off. You have $50. What is the most expensive thing you can buy?

The world we know is filled with things we do not know like the situation above. Mathematicians know this as well as anyone. Because of this, they invented an entire branch of mathematics to work with uncertain facts. That is, of course, algebra.

Algebra is broadly defined as the branch of mathematics devoted to doing arithmetic on objects that are not necessarily numbers. Mathematicians use algebra to either find unknown numbers or to find numbers that do not even exist. Algebra allows us to find the number of objects we can purchase with $50. But it also allows us to find the number of objects we could purchase with any amount of money.

Though algebra always existed in idea, it was not until the end of the 16th century that it existed in a more structured form. The French mathematician François Viète was the first to introduce notations for algebra problems. Before him, the Greeks and Arabs had come up with ways of finding unknowns. But they had not come up with a way of writing the problems so that they could be used again and again with different unknowns. Viète set up a structure and system of symbols for writing down all algebraic problems so that the specifics could change from situation to situation. That structure is still widely used today, even though he did not even have the equal sign (=) to use!

As much as you might hate doing algebra in school, you have to like the fact that it exists in the world. Try living before Viète in a world where we could not all agree on how to find unknown information. Of course, such a world itself would be unknown, so how could we even describe it?