How can one be naturally good at maths?

zoobyshoe

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...gning-numbers/

sophiecentaur

You can just make up the words up as you go along, I suppoze. (Well - why not a Z???)

You will find that the last bastion of properly used English is probably in India, actually.

zoobyshoe

One of my favorite writers of English at PF is Gokul90210, who has origins in the Indian Subcontinent, yes.

KiwiKid

Nice save.

zoobyshoe

With google you can connect anything with anything.

AnTiFreeze3

I've done your work for you, in order to back up your empty claim.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dict...ar_1?q=nuclear. Click on the pronunciations in both American-English and British-English to see the difference.

zoobyshoe

I'm hearing "NEW clee ah" and not "NEW cleer".

AnTiFreeze3

My thoughts as well. They definitely don't just combine the words "new" and "clear" together, it just appears that, in the United States, we emphasize the end of the word more so than the British.

20Tauri

Well, putting aside the question of whether math is something we invented or discovered, it is possible to have a natural aptitude for something artificial. Painting, for example, is not a "natural" activity, but some people are better at painting than others. Of course, there's also the consideration that in any activity, a lot of what gets praised as talent is actually the result of lots and lots of practice.

chiro

Absolutely agree about the practice part, but I don't know if painting should be classed as un-natural.

Creativity and expression are pretty natural things IMO of which painting is a mere tiny-subset. Also you should think about things like savants who seem to have a very narrow focus towards forms of expression including painting and music (often the savants are autistic savants or the term (which I don't like one bit) 'idiot' savants).

zoobyshoe

I think painting probably is natural. Primitive cultures have always painted as far as we know, though, as with math, the more primitive the culture the less sophisticated the painting. The cave paintings at Lascaux are estimated to be 17,300 years old and they're top notch as primitive art goes. I bet people were drawing with charcoal as soon as we harnessed fire. It probably started out as doodling, exploring the fact you could make marks with the charcoal on a rock or tree. (Kids today make marks everywhere as soon as they realize it can be done.) Little by little the marks became more deliberate and controlled. The next generation copied the more controlled marks and developed more control themselves, and so on, and eventually you had Michelangelo.

20Tauri

You could make the same argument that math is fundamentally natural because undoubtedly people figured out how to count fairly early in the history of civilization, then they learned arithmetic, etc. But if you don't think painting is an artificial pursuit, then we could talk about playing the piano (certainly someone had to invent such an instrument, whether or not the musical drive is natural) or building model airplanes or driving stick shift or any number of things. I just picked painting as an off-hand example.

zoobyshoe

Now that you mention it, everything people do has to be based on some core activity which is natural. What seems unnatural, artificial, is how far we take it compared to other animals. Euclid, for instance, collected all the then known knowledge of geometry, wrote it down and began to teach it. Compared to animals that seems like an extremely artificial thing to do. But calling it "artificial" really only means we don't observe other animals doing it.

The core activity of collecting information that no one individual alone would have figured out, and passing it on, must actually be quite natural for humans. Adding to it and developing it over generations must also be perfectly natural for humans: we see it happening all over the world in the history of all peoples.