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Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Geometry in the Amazon
While high school freshmen sometimes struggle with parallelograms and the Pythagorean rule, people deep in the Amazon quickly grasp some basic concepts of geometry.
Although these indigenous tribes had never seen even a ruler, a new study found they understood parallelism and right angles and can use distance, angles, and other relationships in maps to locate hidden objects.
According to LiveScience, the finding suggests all humans, regardless of language or schooling, possess a core set of geometrical intuitions.
“While geometrical concepts can be enriched by culture-specific devices like maps, or the terms of a natural language, underneath this variability lies a shared set of geometrical concepts,” said study co-author Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard University.
The study is detailed in the Jan. 20 issue of the journal Science. Rainforest math class Spelke and her colleagues developed and administered two sets of tests during two visits to the Munduruku people, who live in remote areas along the Cururu River in Brazil.
They assessed comprehension of basic concepts such as points, lines, parallelism, figure congruence, and symmetry by presenting arrays of six images, one of which was subtly different from the rest.
Subjects as young as six years old pointed to the dissimilar image an average of 66.8 percent of the time, showing competence with basic concepts of topology,
Euclidean geometry, and basic geometrical figures, researchers say.
In the second test researchers gave subjects a simple diagram and asked them to identify which of three containers arrayed in a triangle on the ground hid an object. Both Munduruku adults and children were able to relate the geometrical information on the map to the geometrical relationships on the ground, scoring a success rate of 71 percent.
The Mundurukus’ scores matched the performance of American children, but were somewhat lower than educated American adults taking these tests.
This suggests that formal education enhances or refines geometrical concepts.
However, the authors conclude, “The spontaneous understanding of geometrical concepts and maps by this remote human community provides evidence that core geometrical knowledge…is a universal constituent of the human mind.”
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (January 24, 2006 issue)
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