Nov 25 - On Numbers with Personality

 

Prior to reading this paper I had heard of synaesthesia in the context of sound with colour, but Ordinal Linguistic Personification was new to me. In light of this paper, Hardy’s quote, specifically that “each positive integer”, implies to me that Ramanujan was an OLP synesthete.

I think this, namely OLP and synaesthesia, is something I would introduce to my class only to the extent that they knew it existed, in case one of them was one. I consider myself a very cold-hard-logic person, so applying personality characteristics to numbers is not something I’m interested it or consider particularly valuable.

That said, I do acknowledge that some letters have symbolic significance to me beyond their general usage. The letters D and F are easily associated with failure because of their use in the grading system. The letter S is associated with success/greatness because of its use in describing the top tier of competition in eSport settings, namely StarCraft 2, which has since been extended to 'tier lists' in various competitive video games. Finally the letter X has some association with “edginess” or “badassery” due to its use in internet and video game usernames in the early 2000s.