Number with personality

Ramanujan considered that each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends. According to Major’s paper, this type of individuals who have the tendency to put personal characteristics to numbers are thought of having Ordinal Linguistic Personification (OLP). Comparing numbers as his personal friends, Ramanujan associated not only the personalities to numbers, but also possibly ages, genders, looks, and etc. Since OLP is one type of synaesthesia, one can presume that Ramanujan can make connections between many different kinds of mental experience. 

I would consider introducing the concept of linking characteristics and numbers to students at lower grades. The reason is that I have seen young kids who are emotionally scared of mathematics. Some may call this the “math anxiety”. Asking students to give numbers personalities and characteristics might help them “dedemonize” math. For example, a student can think of himself as “Zero”. “One” is the guy living next door. “One” is a weird old man who only makes friends with people who are “primes” such as “Two”, “Three”, or “Five”. “Three”, “Four” and “Five” are living down the street and they formed a band called “P-Triple”. They are proud to be the band with the youngest average age. However, “Six”, “Eight”, and “Ten” are in another competing band called “Nobody is Odd”. The story can go on with more characters and more plots. The point is to make students more familiar with numbers and their properties. Also, some important attributes of math such as creativity and imaginations are promoted in this type of learning. 

As a math student, numbers always means more than just numbers to me. For example, I really like the number “seven”. For some reason, “seven” is disliked by many people. But to me, seven is an interesting number. It is single digit, prime, odd, and “hard to get along with”. However, it is not only a Mersenne prime, but also a double Mersenne prime. It has the highest probability of being rolled with two standard dice. It is, outside of three, the only other dimension that a vector cross product can be defined. And one thing everyone knows, we have seven days in a week!! So, to me, “seven” is like a low-key and odd person that is often underappreciated by the others. Many of my favorite people are like that. Hence, if I have to pick a favorite number, it will definitely be seven.