You may have struggled with mathematics classes in high school and college, but according to researchers, math was no problem for you when you were an infant.
US researchers first discovered this in 1992, but their findings have been hotly debated in math circles ever since. Now new research shows that infants as young as six months know when an arithmetic solution is wrong.
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Why do Asians do much better at math?both in school, and afterwards? (They also have less dyslexia). It may have to do with the structure of their written languages.
Roxanne Khamsi writes in New Scientist that the language you speak may help to determine how your brain circuits develop and thus how your brain solves math problems. Asian languages use characters that are based on drawings, so people for whom this was their first language?even if they speak a Western language now?use the VISUAL parts of the brains to solve ALL problems.
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Did you ever stop and think about how our alphabet was invented?about how the letters and symbols of all the different alphabets around the world were conceived? Scientists now think they all came from nature.
A new study of how robots view the world has given researchers the theory that the shapes of letters in all languages come from common forms in nature. But how did robot technology give rise to this revelation?
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Many of us non-mathematicians are intrigued by the movie “Proof,” the TV show “Numbers” and the book “Freakenomics,” even though we don’t fully understand how math problems are solved. Now University of Massachusetts researchers have invented a new algorithm which solves the problem that has puzzled mathematicians for years: how does “six degrees of separation” work? This is the theory, made into a play and then a movie of the same name, that says that there are only 6 people between yourself and anyone in the world you want to make contact with.
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