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March 04, 2008
As it happens, I was present during one delirious afternoon when the children finally did catch on to the basic principles of number - the fact that with numbers you can count anything. Released from the schoolhouse, the excited children ran hither and tither in little groups, applying their new found insight: they counted the houses, the dogs, the trees, fingers and toes, each other - and the numbers worked every time.
Account of Umeda children of Papua New Guinea learning to count numbers by Alfred Gell (cited on the Routledge Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of Mathematics)
(I'm not sure if the Umedas originally could count up to 47 using parts of the body for each number or could count up to 5 using combinations of 1's and 2's. Either way, i found the account of this sudden realization of abstraction very exciting.)
Posted by claudia