Math in the News
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Not much of a post today, but there are two things I’d like to bring your attention to:
If you’ve read the recent posts about bases, you might find this comic in today’s Sunday supplement of many newspapers interesting. It’s from “Foxtrot” by Bill Amend. He often references science and math in his comics.
This week there was an article in the NY Times Science section about what has been theorized to be the two different “number senses” humans may posses. Here is an except:
“a host of new studies suggests that the two number systems, the bestial and celestial, may be profoundly related, an insight with potentially broad implications for math education.”
As far as I can tell, the theory references subitizing (a two-dollar word for a nickel concept), which the article does not mention. Subitizing is the Idea that the mind can count or estimate small numbers of items without engaging higher parts of the brain. It is the “sudden knowledge” of amounts. There is more to it than this, of course. The article gives you a pretty good Idea of what it is.
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