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I think it's more of the latter. The shapes are not there to help him do arithmetic in a more efficient way. The shapes are there just because that's how number
by educaysean 5y ago
I think it's more of the latter. The shapes are not there to help him do arithmetic in a more efficient way. The shapes are there just because that's how numbers are represented in the author's brain.
I experienced similar things growing up. For my case, it was usually colors. Each number was associated with a specific shade of color, but in my case it was less about the numbers themselves; it was more contextual. Eg. The number four represented different colors depending on whether it was describing the time of day, the number of floors on a building, or amount in currency.
I had brought this up in my youth only to be met with derision and threatened with being labeled "abnormal" by the authority figures, so I worked to suppress and hide this aspect. (South Korean society had a lot of backwards ideas in the 90s).
- deltaonefour 5y agoMinus the contextual thing... colors are monoidal under RGB. Its a 3 dimensional vector with all the properties of numbers. All of this is because our eyes have 3 color detectors, RGB. The reality is, RGB is just a mapping. Actual color is a singular number scalar based off the wavelength of light. So colors are actually a GOOD choice for number representation. The real question is how do colors compose in your brain? If you encountered two numbers 8 and 9. Could you add those numbers just thinking in terms of colors? What about for large numbers, there must be large enough numbers where no color mapping exists as colors have limited range in our spectrum of vision. How does your brain picture 9999999999999999999999? Even if it's contextual if your brain follows consistent logic during composition of numeric entities it's still a valid analogy. The can opener number 9 just seems completely over engineered.