Why do we use letters like x and y to represent numbers in algebra?
In: Mathematics
Fun fact: computer science has it’s own version of these, called [Metasyntactic variables](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable) which are used as stand-ins for “could be anything here”. Using x, y, etc. would be confusing because it might look like mathematics code. So you get `foo` and `bar` everywhere, then maybe `wibble` and `blarg` in New Zealand or different ones in other countries.
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