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Contents

• Welcome to Homepage of Masaaki Souda

• RAKUGAKICHO
  
  • History of Elementary Mathematics
    
  • Japanese is not easy.
    
  • Kanji is very difficult.
    
  • other articles

  • Your impressions or opinions

RAKUGAKICHO

NO.４

　I think it is very important for human being to count in order to develop mathematics. How they recognize the numbers? What relations are there between numbers and number names?

　This book tells us that giving a well-known instance of a deaf-and-dumb boy who acquired a knowledge of number from observing his fingers, one can get the idea of number before developing spoken language. We can understand this easily. The animals like dogs could probably recognize the number of persons. So even if the savages don't have the number names more than 2, it means they can't count more than 2. They could count by marking in the sand or by pointing to the objects counted, one by one. In the same way the primitive tribes could count, it infers.

　We can find a lot of interesting themes in this book, can't we?

[RAKUGAKICHO]　Back number [NO.1] [NO.2] [NO.3]