Alice Major on Mayan and other numbers

 I think the quote "each of the positive integers was one of [Ramanujan's] personal friends" aligns very well with the results of Alice Major's paper: people tend to associate numbers with properties, an those association tend to be cultural based and not random. It's quite interesting that such a simple association in people that might come off as natural can be so involved in terms of brain structure and how we process and react to information. Neuroscience must be an interesting yet difficult field of study as we try to unfold the mystery of the brain. (Although I have presented already, I just wanted to say that John von Neumann's proposed self-replication machine predicts certain properties needed for it to happen: we need to have blueprints to replicate, the complexity required to self-replicate and self-repair. Even today, we cannot build a robot that fixes itself, but humans have been replicating (though not by oneself) and can self-repair to some degree, which goes to show how complex the human body is).

I think introducing this association between numbers and ideas would be a fun little topic, although I feel that it might work a lot better in the lower level like elementary. As Major suggests in her article, it seems that we learn mathematics first by scaffolding a range of small numbers that we can associate to physical objects or measurements, and then we would be able to extend our thoughts on more abstract ideas. I think secondary students might not benefit as much, although I don't doubt they will, from the associations introduced to them. It would be a good example to use, for say extending our number system to include irrational numbers as we would first understand positive integers and then build on and extend the thoughts to capture more scenarios. 

For me, I am Chinese so those examples in the article about 8s and 4s apply to me quite well. When I buy lottery tickets I might choose certain combinations like prime numbers, or an equal amount of even and odd numbers, or making sure that no two numbers share a common divisor. While my probability course told me that it wouldn't really matter which 6 numbers you choose, it might just be a personal association as pointed out by the article, and finally, just why not choose what I like?

As an aside, I was reading an interesting sci-fi novel and the author proposed that we as humans can only sense so many things. There are so many other things we cannot accurately sense like gravitational, magnetic, electric fields, current or forces. If we could somehow engineer ourselves or the next generation to feel one of those things, perhaps they would develop a different system of understanding nature and make different associations then than we do now.