Mayan Math and Myron Medina

 

This article was a nice one to end off with for the year! It makes me reminisce about when I was in elementary school and trying to find some sort of prediction between our names and "cubby number" we were given. I think it is the root of my fondness of the number 5 -- since my last name starts with a "D", I also tend to be given either number 5 or 6 in a group of 30, and I never really liked 6, for some reason. I think I have also always had this likeness for 5 because in a elementary music class we would sing a song about multiplication table of 5. It would start along the lines of "5 times 5 is 25...." and end with a little poem about barley and Charlie. I still love it and remember it satisfying me as a child, with all the rhythm and patterns of the 5's times table. 

Its no surprise that it follows that I also really enjoyed Medina's poems at the end of her article. I loved reading them and seeing exactly how she brought those numbers to life in a way that I relate to, although I am not sure if they were intentioned to be inspired by the Mayan characters, as in my brief reading I only noticed a couple subtleties. 

Its strange to me that as I was reading the final prompt for this blog post that I really do not have as much of a connection to months/letters/days of the week as I do to numbers. Or maybe I am just more drawn to numbers more than the average person, so this peculiarity to numbers sticks out to me.

I would consider showing this concept to my secondary math students, if we have time, or maybe foe enrichment, or maybe for a "get to know you" activity. I love personalizing numbers and it almost feels like a bit of a controversy to me as well. For example, most justifications for numbers I can try to relate to, but Pythagoras' definition of male being 2 and female being 3 is just so wrong to me. I think of females being stereotypically symmetrical (ie. two halves) and males are just more odd. I see here that I'm taking the word odd to mean two different things, but the same applies to females. I consider females to be more "even-headed" so I think of even numbers as more feminine. I suppose it is not good that I am bring gender stereotyping into numerals, but maybe it is a bias worth considering.   

In regards to Taxicab Numbers, I was unable to access the Wolfram Alpha article, but after a wikipedia search on Taxicab Numbers and Ramanujan, I suppose I am unsurprised that Ramanujan was the person to have such a sentiment towards numbers. It is quite remarkable that he would consider such detailed facts/patters for four-digit numbers. It kind of makes my pattern search feel a little bit less special, but I do appreciate that such a famous mathematician shares a similar thought pattern to me.