Numbers with Personality

Prior to reading this paper, I was aware of Synesthesia but not OLP. I think that Major's paper touches upon important aspects that I hadn't thought about before. Specifically, when she spoke about social numbers and how letters such as 'A' are associated with more popular colors such as A. This could be due to the fact that when we are taught the letter system from a young age in western cultures, the letter 'A' is associated with a an apple -  they tend to associate the letters with another object to familiar the children and thus, that is where red comes into the picture. However, when reading that example, I saw it more as we associate letters that are more frequently used with colours that are more frequent as well and that is why the letter 'y' or 'u' would be associated with the colours brown or beige. 

I think that students should be given the opportunity to link numbers with another form of sensory or cognitive pathways such as colours or different traits as it would allow the students to form a better understanding that is less abstract than just a number in itself. I think this has proven to be successful with the example I talked about above, where letters are associated with objects that start with that letter (A for Apple, B for Bees etc). 

After understanding what exactly Synesthesia and OLP entails, I can infer that Ramanujan had personification based synesthesia with his particular line "each of the positive integers". After this, I started thinking about my own life and if I associate certain traits with numbers, or months etc. Upon pondering about this,  I did seem to associate the different days of the week with more positive or negative emotions. Also, from living in Asia for majority of my life, I also seem to unconsciously denote different numbers with my own luck scale, 8 being very lucky and 4 being unlucky and I think that this was fostered in me from what Major wrote about in the General number association sub title. Here she explained that in Chines cultures, the number 8 was denoted as lucky and therefore I think I had inherited a similar mindset from living in that culture for an extended period of time. 




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