"Numbers with Personality" Reflection

 Alice Major’s article, “Numbers with Personality” was delightfully intriguing! It connected so nicely to Myron Medina’s presentation on Mayan Mathematics, and I quite enjoyed learning about the head variants, social numbers, ordinal linguistic personification, mathematical elements of synesthesia, and Ramanujan’s taxicab number. Something that I found particularly interesting was that the Mayan’s visual connection with numbers overlaps quite a bit with Ramanujan’s personified relationship with numbers; perhaps it alludes to a connection between these types of learners and grasp of mathematics (and perhaps it doesn’t). Ramanujan’s remarkably exceptional ability to see numbers in the way that most of us couldn’t, no doubt led to parts of his success. And, what is certain, is that the relationship that we form with numbers, in terms of self and culture, has an impact on our perception of the world. 

I would definitely introduce this to my secondary math students; I personally value an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and ensuring that students form a deeper and more creative bond with the material that they interact with, and encouraging these types of opportunities in my classroom paves the way to achieving that. I think that it’s very important for students to retain that sense of curiosity and wonder when they begin to tackle more intellectually demanding concepts, and it’s especially helpful in terms of maturing their numerical comprehension. It’s also a source of inspiration for them, to know that there were absolutely brilliant civilizations and mathematicians out there that were able to think in unconventional ways. Personifying numbers ties in really well to mathematical literature, so I might use this as segue to introducing topics in Calculus to facilitate these bonds. It’s crucial that students learn to view mathematics with a much more light-hearted approach, because once they can see that mathematics isn’t as intimidating as it seems, they can start to enjoy seeing it everywhere. 

Numbers don’t quite have personalities for me. However, I do think primes, squares, and cubes have a certain sense of pride to them. In terms of connecting with numbers in that way, my sister and I have a particular affinity for digital clocks. For example, if the time was 3:43, we’d call that ‘7 cubed’; 3:14 is ‘pi time’; 10:24 is ‘2 to the 10’; 7:54 is ‘quarter after 9 cubed’... and so forth. We definitely fancy the same time having multiple numerical associations- so 10:01, for instance, is a Scheherazade number, palindromic number, sphenic number, and it’s in Pascal’s triangle! These considerably extroverted numbers stand out to us quite a bit more than something such as 9768, which would never appear on a clock. But the more we get to know a number through its significance and historical relevance, the more friendly it becomes. It’s super nerdy, but it’s also really fun :)