Those of us who learned arithmetic using pen and paper, working with the ten digits 0–9 and place value, may take for granted that this is the way i

Re-counting the Cognitive History of Numerals

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2021-06-28 00:30:05

Those of us who learned arithmetic using pen and paper, working with the ten digits 0–9 and place value, may take for granted that this is the way it’s always been done, or at least the way it ought to be done. But if you think of the amount of time and energy spent in the early school years just to teach place value, you’ll realize that this sort of numeracy is not preordained.

Over the past 5,500 years, more than 100 distinct ways of writing numbers have been developed and used by numerate societies, linguistic anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis has found. Thousands more ways of speaking numbers, manipulating physical objects, and using human bodies to enumerate are known to exist, or to have existed, he writes in his new book “Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, and History.” Remarkably, each of the basic structures was invented multiple times independently of one another. In “Reckonings,” Chrisomalis considers how humans past and present have used numerals, reinterpreting historical and archaeological representations of numerical notation and exploring the implications of why we write numbers with figures rather than words. Drawing on, and expanding upon, the enormous cross-cultural and comparative literatures in linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the history of science that bear on questions of numeracy, he shows that numeracy is a social practice.

Chrisomalis took time out from a busy end to the spring semester to field a few questions about his new book, his spirited defense of Roman numerals, his complicated relationships with mathematicians, and his thoughts on the validity of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

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