Go with your gut on numbers
The New York Times runs a science story relating two methods of computation. One, the general “which line is shorter?” type that we and many animals practice daily, along with the higher-level “what is the cube root of 512?” form of mathematics.
Turns out that skill with the former may be an important indicator of expertise in the latter.
“When mathematicians and physicists are left alone in a room, one of the games they’ll play is called a Fermi problem, in which they try to figure out the approximate answer to an arbitrary problem,” said Rebecca Saxe, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is married to a physicist. “They’ll ask, how many piano tuners are there in Chicago, or what contribution to the ocean’s temperature do fish make, and they’ll try to come up with a plausible answer.”
“What this suggests to me,” she added, “is that the people whom we think of as being the most involved in the symbolic part of math intuitively know that they have to practice those other, nonsymbolic, approximating skills.”
A quick, fun test designed to measure some of your gut math skills is here. I got 84 percent on 25 views.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
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