Apparently numbers are beautiful, and can be fun!We had a visit from one of my very earliest students, who I hadn’t seen since graduation almost 50 years ago.

She had trained in maths at uni, but ended up teaching maths at school. This didn’t seem to be sufficiently rewarding to her, so she came into the Art School to train as a potter, teaching maths part-time to support herself during this 2nd lifestyle choice of vocation as a mature age student.

We had an interesting catch-up and she explained to me that numbers have a personality and are beautiful. She told me that she could look at a number and know a lot about it from its ‘character’, or something akin to its ‘personality’?

Numbers are like people, you can learn a lot about them just by the way that they look. 

I’m not a maths person myself. However during our conversation, I started to understand a little bit more about the look of numbers and learnt that I do have some little bit of insight into numbers. When I was at school, we had to learn maths by rote. I never felt the desire to enquire further. So unlike my experience of learning about ceramics, which I couldn’t stop thinking about, pondering, romancing etc. in my spare moments.

These days, I usually only use numbers to defend myself. ie. to add up the bill and check it for accuracy. But I sometimes use my limited maths to understand the chemistry of clays and glazes, ie. Brongniarts formula, Segar formula, and electric kiln wiring calculus to build heating element systems. They are not ‘fun’  jobs, this is strictly work. So some of that rote learning does get regurgitated and applied to real-life practical questions. I’m pleased that I am able to put my mind to it successfully. So numbers are useful, but I don’t romance them.

However, I was amazed to find that although I know next to nothing about maths and have little interest in it, I do know something about the look of numbers. When I say, the look of numbers, what I’m referring to is the insight that you gain through familiarity, like the look of words. I may not know how to spell some words, but when I write them down, I can tell that they look either wrong or right. So I recognise that I do know more than I realise.

Here are some of the numbers that first came to mind, and that I realised that I knew the look of pretty well;

0, (zero) having read the book ’The nothing that is!’. I learnt that as a species we learnt to count to to describe and tally  the things that we owned. Goats, for example. If I only own one goat, then I pretty well always know where it is. but if I was and early human learning to convert from hunter gathering to residual farming and herding, then I would need to be able to know exactly how many goats I had, where they were, and if one was missing, so counting became a useful and necessary asset. 

It’s not a long stretch of the imagination to think about the farmer who owned no goats, didn’t need to count, so it took a very long time for the concept of ‘0’ zero to come into existence. No one really ever needed to specifically count the fact that they didn’t have anything. Who would believe that someone could write an interesting book about nothing!

Well, Robert Kaplan, that’s who! “The nothing that is- a natural History of Zero”.

3, my favourite number. Because there is something odd about it.

21, how old my truck is

61, the route that Bob Dylan metaphorically revisited.

66, the highway that black Americans used to escape, persecution, rape and lynchings, and sang about in the early blues.

666, the number of the beast! 

667, the neighbour of the beast!

2000, the cost of registering, green slipping, insuring, and putting 2 new tyres on my old truck to get it through rego inspection today. I own it outright, but this is the cost of renting it back from the institutions that allow me to drive it on the roads.

31428 Pi

13579 primes

12358 fibonacci

Just a few that come to mind quickly.

That was fun!