Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:06:01 -0500 From: "David T. Lewis" lewis@mail.msen.com Subject: Re: However ...Re: [Squeakland] Panel discussion: Can the
>American Mind be Opened?
To: subbukk subbukk@gmail.com Message-ID: 20071128020601.GA75166@shell.msen.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
On Mon, Nov 26, 2007 at 11:38:30PM +0530, subbukk wrote:
Coming from a culture steeped in oral tradition, I find 'sounds' better than 'symbols' when doing math 'in the head'. The way I learnt to handle numbers (thanks to my dad) is to think of them as a phrase. 324+648 would be sounded out like "three hundreds two tens and four and six hundreds and four tens and eight. three hundreds and six hundreds makes nine hundreds, two tens and four tens make six tens and four and eight makes one ten and two, giving me a total of nine hundreds seven tens and two". Subtraction was done using complements. So 93-25 would be sounded out as "five more to three tens, six tens more to nine tens and then three more, making a total of six tens and eight'. The technique works for any radix - 0x3c would be "three sixteens and twelve'.
In India, many illiterate shopkeepers and waiters in village restaurants use these techniques to total prices and hand out change. No written bills.
The advantage with sounds is that tones/stress/volume can be used to decorate numbers. With pencil and paper, changing colors, sizes or weights would be impractical.
Subbu,
Thanks for sharing this. I think that it is very interesting that sound and oral skills can be a basis for mathematical thinking. My cultural background is less oral, so I did not even think of this as a possibility. It seems that music and mathematics are somehow connected, but I never thought to extend this to verbal types of music.
Dave
I took a couple music theory courses in college years ago. One of my professors mentioned that he noticed a correlation between those who were good at math and those who tended to grasp music theory readily. He had no explanation for this though.
---Mark mmille10@comcast.net
On Thursday 29 November 2007 2:33 am, mmille10@comcast.net wrote:
I took a couple music theory courses in college years ago. One of my professors mentioned that he noticed a correlation between those who were good at math and those who tended to grasp music theory readily. He had no explanation for this though.
The underlying connections are still a topic of research. We do have a name for it, though - synesthesia. Wikipedia has interesting links on the topic. Both math and music share many conceptual bases - magnitude, multiples, fractions, proportion, symmetry, cycles, permutations, combinations and so on. A person with deep understanding of these concepts could express them in various ways - dancing (body), music appreciation (ears), sculpting/painting/drawing (hand, eye), singing (vocal organs). What we call "math" is symbolic math - done with marks on paper. Understanding symbolic math is easy once the conceptual math is in place, but building conceptual understanding through symbols is a hard problem; as many teachers will attest.
Subbu
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