Lucy Keer

Are your math visualizations in color? Mine are all black-and-white, presumably in imitation of diagrams in textbooks. Just realized from this @St_Rev tweet that I may be missing an important tool. (Does synesthesia play a role here?)https://twitter.com/St_Rev/status/1189949262307766272?s=20 …

Mine are spatial but mostly not actually visual. So probably more kinesthetic than properly visual. (I have more thoughts about the original point but I haven't decided how to express them usefully yet.)

Yes, this mathematical sense that is vague-ish shapes that aren't quite visual and aren't quite kinesthetic but sort of both is extremely interesting. @michael_nielsen has written some interesting things about it somewhere

It's kind of more the dynamic relationships among the shapes that do the work than the things themselves, I think. Like something pressing on something else

I notice this most clearly when doing simple arithmetic (probably because it's so overtrained). E.g. 3 and 7 have a sense of a shape that "fits together" to make 10, and them getting pressed together is a fair description of how it feels.

If I add two single-digit numbers that sum above 10, it always feels like the smaller digit gets broken apart to fit the larger one. E.g. 8 + 5, the 5 gets broken into a 2 that fits into the 8, and a 3 that's left over. The larger digit is never broken up to fit the smaller one.