[Blindmath] Math in your head

[Steve Jacobson]

John,

You might find this of interest.  When we studied the revolution of a solid,
a concept where a two-dimensional shape was revolved on the Y-axis, the
instructor actually told me he thought I had an easier time with the concept
because I was able to imagine it while he found most of the students tried
to picture it as a three-dimensional drawing on a two-dimensional surface as
they usually handled three dimensions.  I truly do not know if I was at an
advantage or not, but I did seem to have an easier time with it than many
others in the class.  I think we have to understand graphs to get a start at
being able to imagine what something would look like, but where we can think
beyond the paper, we'll have an advantage.  The same is true of doing math
in our heads.  The more we're able to do, the quicker we'll be at solving
equasions, etc.  However, I think it is a very individual thing.  I would
venture to say that when solving complex equasions, most of us are going to
run into that so-called brick wall and need a way to write it out
efficiently at some point.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of John G
Heim via Blindmath
Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2015 8:29 AM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
<blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: John G Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Math in your head

A faculty member here at the UW sent me this link to an article from the web
site of the American Mathematical Society. It talks about blind
mathematicians relying more on memory and something like visualization than
typical mathematicians. IMO, relying on your memory is not a bad thing. I
think of it as a skill blind people develop similar to listening to
synthesized speech at a really high rate. As for visualization, when people
ask me how I do geometry in my head, I often call it feelization. It's not
visual. But feelization is an inadequate term because it's just made up and
I always have to explain it. English doesn't have a word for visualizing
something without vision. Anyway, here's that link:

http://www.ams.org/journals/notices/200210/comm-morin.pdf


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