Alice Major on Mayan and Other Numbers

Is this something that you might want to introduce to your secondary math students? Why or why not?

I likely would not teach this to secondary math students. My reasoning is, although this is interesting, I'm not sure it would help the students understand math better. In high school, when students are learning concepts like pre-calculus and calculus, math can be very hard to grasp. I wouldn't want to complicate things any further

If you would use these ideas in your math class, how might you do so?

I think that these concepts can be applied and useful to a different age group. For example, in primary school when students are first learning to use addition and subtraction I could see this playing a role. The concepts and personalities of the numbers would obviously be simplified from what the Mayans used, to apply to primary students. I think that a video, showing numbers as personalities and how they interact could be extremely fun and useful to these primary school students. For example, showing a pair of fives as young and energetic twins, then showing a ten as a more mature and larger version of those fives, showing that two of those fives equal to that ten. This is a very rough example, but hopefully, you get the point. 

Do numbers have particular personalities for you? Why, how, or why not? What about letters of the alphabet, days of the week, months of the year, etc?

I have never thought about it like this, but now that I am thinking about it, definitely. I saw a meme a while back that said "I can't explain why, but the number eight, the day Thursday, and the month October all are the same", and I couldn't agree more. I tried dissecting the reason for it and I think it's all about being an even number and being close to the end of their respective spectrums. Eight is an even number and is very close to ten, October is an even-numbered month (tenth) and is close to the end of the year. I know technically Thursday is the fifth day of the week, with Sunday being the first but I think most people think of Thursday as the fourth day of the week and Monday as the first, which would make it an even-numbered day and close to the end of the week. Additionally, I see five and ten as being preppy and perfect, likely because of being seen as "round numbers". I see numbers 2,4,6 and 8 as being related because they are even. Three and nine are seen as the "rebels" to me, somewhat related to six, but a little rough around the edges. Then that leaves one and seven, I see one as being the baby of the group (self-explanatory) and I see seven as being the hipster. I think this personality comes from people choosing a number between one and ten, somehow seven is always the most common choice. This is likely because it doesn't fit into any of the usual categories (even numbers, multiples of five, multiple of three, close to zero, or close to ten), it is just kind of its own thing and I respect seven for that. After reading this story, I will definitely look at numbers differently.