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Humanity’s Strangest Language: On the Joys of Translating Math ‹ Literary Hub

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I once asked an auditorium of undergraduates to recall their earliest memories of math. One of them shared a scene so peculiar—and yet so universal—that it burrowed deep into my unconscious, to the point where it has begun to feel like a memory of my own. At age five, this student was assigned worksheets of addition problems. Trouble was, she didn’t know how to read the funny symbols on the pages, the 2’s and +’s and such. No one had ever taught her. Too intimidated to ask, she found a work-around, memorizing each sum not as a fact about numbers, but as an arbitrary rule about shapes. For example, 8 + 1 = 9 was not the statement that 9 is one more than 8, but a coded set of instructions: if you are shown two stacked circles (8), followed by a cross (+), a vertical line (1), and a pair of horizontal lines (=), then you must fill in the blank space provided by writing a circle with a downward-curling tail (9). With painstaking diligence, she taught herself dozens of rules like this, each

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