Personalities of Numbers

I think in terms of Major’s paper, being friends with positive integers is Ramanujan’s personal synesthesia. Other than influence from cultural and religious aspects, everyone has their own way to connect to numbers. I think these connections improve students’ number sense and develop their mathematical thinking skills. Therefore, I would like to introduce personalities of numbers to secondary math students and more importantly, make them share their own ideas about numbers. It would be interesting that some of them could have the same impression of a number and for some numbers, they might have different interpretations. However, I believe that teachers should not train students to have a unified way to think about numbers. For instance, currently, algebra tiles are used in secondary school math learning and the red sides are set to represent negatives. I am confused with it - for me, blue seems to be more negative than red as red has a higher temperature than blue.

My synesthesia of numbers mostly comes from my cultural background and the sounds of my native language. My student numbers and my family’s lucky numbers have impacts on me as well. As I mentioned before, I also link numbers to colours and temperatures etc. I noticed that I have a preference for even numbers when I picked phone numbers, but I do not know where this kind of bias comes from.