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Comment by _4jlx | Hacker News Reader

These are research findings, not my own ideas: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for-math-1410...

This idea has been floating around for decades (wouldn't surprise me some researchers decided to test it), but its exact claims are only around ease of counting and arithmetic (the very basic levels), not mathematics as a whole.

Ease of counting numerals doesn't necessarily translate to overall mathematical ability. French and Russian have fairly complicated numerals, but many of the world's best mathematicians also happen to be French and Russian speaking... and of course, English speaking.

At the higher levels of mathematics, abstract thinking becomes more important than arithmetic. It's not obvious to me that facility at arithmetic is necessarily advantageous then. In fact, I wonder if highly inflected languages (Latin-derived) or those with complex grammars (Hungarian, Slavic) train the brain to work with symbols more efficiently.

You may be right about the abstract thinking, but if we're talking strictly in terms of PISA test scores, Russia and France performed only slightly above average in a fairly recent year. However, I acknowledge that measuring mathematical proficiency with test scores alone is flawed.

>Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish use simpler number words and express math concepts more clearly than English

Than English...that article is complete bullshit, the Inuits have 30 different words for snow = more information density, but is it usable for every culture?

Can you elaborate on how having 30 words for snow affects a language's information density?

English needs maybe 4-5 five words to describe a particular snow condition (hard crust but underneath soft and wet), Inuits have one single word for that exact snow-condition therefore a higher information density (for that situation)

This is not the information density we are referring to.

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