Natural Blogarithms

“A life with out love math, that’s terrible! . . . Love Math is like oxygen, love math is a many spendored thing, love math lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love   math. . .” (Ewan MacGregor’s character in Moulin Rouge)

Can you imagine a world, a people, a culture with no concept of number, and hence no understanding of any fundamental mathematical concepts. Consider the following simple problem:

Which of the following sets of objects have more in them?

Set A: x x x x x

Set B: y y y y y y

In a world without numbers, we don’t know the answer. I came across this article that absolutely fascinated me. There is a tribe in the Amazon that has been studied for several decades which has no concept of numbering or counting.

Life without numbers in a unique Amazon tribe

A study appearing today in the journal Science reports that the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting.

Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can’t learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time.

Their lack of enumeration skills is just one of the mental and cultural traits that has led scientists who have visited the 300 members of the tribe to describe the Piraha as “something from Mars.”

Daniel Everett, an American linguistic anthropologist, has been studying and living with Piraha for 27 years.

…

Their lack of numbering terms and skills is highlighted in a report by Columbia University cognitive psychologist Peter Gordon that appears today in Science.

Intrigued by anecdotal reports that Prof. Everett and his wife Keren had presented about the mathlessness of Piraha life, Prof. Gordon conducted a number of experiments over a three-year period.

He found that a group of male tribe members — women and children were not involved because of certain cultural taboos — could not perform the most elementary mathematical operations.

When faced with a line of batteries and asked to duplicate the number they saw, the men could not get beyond two or three before starting to make mistakes.

They had difficulty drawing straight lines to copy a number of lines they were presented with. They couldn’t remember which of two boxes had more or less fish symbols on it, even when they were about to be rewarded for their knowledge.

The article makes the point that this kind of throws mud in the face of those linguistic theorists that accept Harvard University professor Steven Pinker’s idea of a universal language instinct.

Could you live without numbers?

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