Winter time in Colorado.
The high temperature today was 72 degrees!
If I had the proper data, I could tell you if this day was a mathematical outlier when compared to past January 21st high temperatures. I'm guessing not, but it would be interesting to find out.
The main reason why I bring up outliers, is because I just finished reading "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell. He authored two other interesting reads: "Blink" and "The Tipping Point". I recommend all three. One of the chapters (titled "Rice Paddies and Math Tests") I found most interesting addressed why Asian students tend to score higher on the TIMMS international math exam than American students. One of the reasons Gladwell sites for this success is the difference between our numbering systems.
"It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen. But we don't. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty and sixty, which sounds like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound like five and three and two, but not really. [...] The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.
That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don't reach forty until they're five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.
The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily."
In "Outliers", Gladwell addresses the importance/advantages of cultural background in creating successful, "outlying" people through several interesting anecdotes. Yesterday, we witnessed the inauguration of a historical outlier. Very amazing to be alive to see Dr. King's dream coming true.
