Perhaps at some point you have seen some mathematical writing and not understood it.
(A)
The complicated notations that might spring to mind ― all those strange dashes, squiggles and letters ― are obvious signs, but a lot of those are really quite modern. Mathematics had been going on for a long time before the dashes and squiggles were invented.
(B)
You would not be the first; rest assured, even professional mathematicians sometimes have to rely on discussions with colleagues to properly understand problems they are looking at. But how do you recognise some writing is mathematical in the first place?
(C)
Put simply, there has to be something mathematical going on for us to say that it is mathematics. And if we are dealing with writing from a very distant past, in a language that is not familiar to us, from a time even before recorded language, that can be sometimes difficult to recognise.
* squiggle: 꼬부라져 읽기 어려운 글자
