NUMBER
WORDS
Annual Conference
October 19, 2007----Reservoir High School, Fulton, Maryland
Session #62 (12:45-1:45)--Room 230
Lawrence Shirley, Professor of Mathematics and Associate
Graduate Dean
College of Graduate Studies and Research
Towson University
410-704-3500 or LShirley@towson.edu
This presentation: http://pages.towson.edu/shirley/numberwords.htm
Personal webpage: http://pages.towson.edu/shirley
Outline: An
earlier, related presentation on "Numbers in Culture, Culture in Numbers"
(MCTM 2005, NCTM 2006)
This page last updated on 3 November 2009; all links checked on 18 October, 2007
Today--October 19, 2007--is the birthday of three notable mathematicians:
This is the hexacontakaidisession (see
Dictionary of Number Words
)
Common words of numerical quantities
---e.g., dozen; how many can you find?
Problem with teens
---the words for the teens don't seem to fit!
Ordinals and Fractions
---the same?
Big and small number terms
---kajillions?
Other languages—patterns, groupings; words of your students
---in what languages can you count?
Nominals
---numbers used as names
(bonus: what is special about 38?)
Links
--Dictionary of Number Words
(also Number Names, Number
Notation Systems, and Integer
Factors )
--Special
numbers (individual) and types
of special numbers (from MathWorld)
--MathWorld's references: Small
Numbers (special numbers up to a few thousand) and Large
Numbers (giants)
--You can find words for one to ten in over 5000 languages(!) here.
--BIG
numbers by counting pennies (Also, follow the links at the end for
terminology and more sense of BIG numbers)
--a suggestion for names
for big numbers
Bibliography
(with links to
--Dudley, Underwood, Numerology--or,
What Pythagoras Wrought, Mathematical Association of America, 1997.
--Guedj, Denis, Numbers:
The Universal Language, Harry N Abrams, Inc., 1997
--Ifrah, Georges, The
Universal History of Numbers, Wiley, 1994.
--Menninger, Karl, Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History of Numbers, Dover, 1992.
--Siefe, Charles, Zero:
The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Penguin Books, 2000.
--Shirley, Lawrence, "Nominals: Numbers as Names" Teaching
Children Mathematics, 2,4 (December 1995) pp.242-45.
--Arthur Jules Morin (1795-1880)
French; an applied mathematician, especially working on problems of friction,
hydraulics, and waterwheels
--Jean Delsarte (1903-1968)
French; he worked mostly on analysis and theory of functions
--Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995)
Indian, later American; worked in theoretical astronomy (star dynamics),
relativity, quantum theory
See mathematicians
of the day, part of the MacTutor History of Mathematics website, for over 1700 mathematicians' birthdays, biographies,
and other topics related to the history of mathematics.
Note that 62 is the smallest number that can be written as the sum of three distinct squares in two different ways!
(Can you find the two sums of three squares?)