Monday, November 23, 2020

Nov 24 - Alice Major on Mayan and other numbers

I don't think that assigning personalities to numbers is a bad thing. It can possibly make math more enjoyable and even give a sense of belonging, and thus enhance one's experience with mathematics. From the Alice Major article it's possible to deduce that it's human to attribute human characteristics to numbers.

I might introduce these ideas to my secondary math students in the case some of them have synesthesia. There are many types of mathematicians who have their own mathematical ways of thinking. We should encourage many ways of thinking about mathematics as there isn't no true way, and mathematics is developed from many different methods. For example, Freeman Dyson, a famous mathematician and physicist, splits mathematicians into "birds" and "frogs" (Source: https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf). The "frogs" are mathematicians who are into puzzles and problem solving (i.e. Paul Erdős), while the "birds" are mathematicians who like big picture ideas, who unify things (i.e. Hilbert, Felix Klein). It should be noted that all these mathematicians have contributed to mathematics in some way. Therefore, we should attack mathematics education from multiple angles, and with regards to Alice Major's paper, Ordinal Linguistic Personification, and synesthesia are some of these angles.

For myself, I'd have to give the boring answer and say that I never attributed anything to numbers themselves. I am more inclined to liking shapes and abstraction, and don't want to make anything personal just in case someday I'd might have to discard it.

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