How the equals sign changed the world

The headline may sound like an overstatement, and as written it probably is, but "the equals sign changed mathematics" would be a simple statement of fact. Proper understanding of the use of the equals sign is highly correlated with mathematical ability; studies have actually been done to demonstrate this.

On the other hand, see https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/1300/how-do-... for an illustration that we shouldn't take too literally this story's conflation of math's `=` with the various flavours of `=` in programming languages.