Jack Morava sent me this delightful link:
Math teacher Ben Orlin writes and draws the (aptly named) blog Math With Drawings and is the author of a new book, Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. To mark its publication, he devised this entertaining accompanying quiz.
A sample:
2. If you see someone write “0.33333,” how do you interpret this?
(a) They clearly meant 1/3.
(b) They clearly meant 33,333/100,000.
(c) Looks like a fifth-iteration address in a generalized Cantor set. But I can’t tell the specifics without more context.
(d) It’s a coded message to my android brain. To escape the time loop, we must follow Commander Riker’s plan and decompress the main shuttle bay.
And at the end, you get to see what your results mean, e.g.:
Mostly B’s: Your style is HYPERLITERAL.
You delight in the pedantry of mathematical culture. This is a language of precision, every symbol’s meaning honed to a sharpened point—and you love wielding those sharp points to poke and prod speakers less precise than yourself.
In short, you’re a linguistic troll. Your literary equivalent is David Foster Wallace.
As a former math major, of course I was tickled (I ended up “normcore,” but I refuse to be equated with Dan Brown); I’ll bet the book is a good read. Thanks, Jack!
oh dear. looking at it makes me update my priors, evidently I’m a troll. oi.
I am everyone except Borges. Oh well …
Oh dear, I’m afraid I’m a hyperliteral.
But as a hyperliteral, the answers above gave me pause, as the response phrase “they clearly meant” was telling me that I am supposed to read the minds of our mostly mathematically illiterate population as they attempt to do arithmetic; in which case a) would indeed be correct, as a) is most probably what most people would have meant, even if they actually said the equivalent of b).
Not mathy myself, but it occurred to me recently that e.g. “zero point one repeating six” would be clearer than the “zero point one six (one six) repeating” that you tend to hear in speech. Do mathematicians have a convention for that?
@ adam : …. that you tend to hear in speech…
I’ve been told that math is a written, not spoken, language (supposedly like classical chinese?).
Can you put “zero point one six (one six) repeating” in an example/context? There’s not much
occasion for eight or nine significant figures in conversation?