A while ago I stumbled upon the topic of "intrinsic quantities." I am at a loss to define it exactly. The vague definition would go something like:
- An object of nature or culture that contains a discernible, relatively obvious reference to a number.
I first started to work with these objects creating some baby and toddler math activities. So, two is for eyes and five is for fingers, and four is for seasons and twelve is for piano half-tones.
The fact that amazes me to no end is that it's pretty hard to find these "intrinsic quantities" using conventional search tools, such as Google. If you try and search for "five" - you will find pictures of five people, lists of five most popular songs, and even the artistic renditions of the digit 5 - and comparably few images that have five as their intrinsic parts. Looks like "hand" and "star" win the popularity prize for representing five, though - they do come up in the searches. I am concluding that in the current culture, those are the images of fiveness.
It is an even harder (and, possibly, more pointless - but artistic!) quest to find intrinsic representations of some multiplicative relations. The chess board represents 8*8=64, and our two hands represent 2*5=10, and of course there are tons of images, sounds and what not about the powers of two. The sevens fascinated people for thousands of years, so there are popular references to seven out there.
As I was going to St. Ives...
Why is searching for fiveness and other number quintessences (pun researched and intended) is so much fun? I do not know, but I am about to find out if it's my own personal craze, or if it will also be fun for other people. Of course collecting is a respectable game mechanism.
And: reticulated giraffes have five horns!
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