A lot of us hated maths, didn't we? While my relationship with maths was not that sour, I didn't quite understand the need for solving those weird word problems which were remotely related to my interests. But that was just half baked assumptions, just to clarify I needed to do some trigonometry to analyse at which point will my endpoint of my SVG arc will will land on.

An interesting article highlights this experiment conducted on an Amazonian tribe which had no terminology of any numbers. It was observed that they couldn't distinguish any quantities greater than three. This was enough to prove that our mind is not naturally wired to understand numbers. However, when picked up my social and linguistic methods as we grow up, it seems an innate part of the human functionality.

Numbers, and counting, began about 4,000 BC in Sumeria, one of the earliest civilisations to keep track of commodities. Their method of counting began as a series of tokens. Each token a man held represented something tangible, say five chickens. If a man had five chickens he was given five tokens. When he traded or killed one of his chickens, one of his tokens was removed. This was a big step in the history of numbers and counting because with that step subtraction — and thus the invention of arithmetic — was invented.

Its interesting to think about how fundamentally linked these numbers are to our everyday chores. While the language, behaviour, mode of communication might differ from one setting to another, numbers are the constant entity so the counting always begins with one.

The power of numbers is such today that every statement now requires certain digits to validate the hypothesis. Try adding a false percent in any statement you deliver, one will instantly accept the same and develop a bias for it based on two digits.

So I do realise now, those weird maths problem statements were not just maths. It was essentially our preparation for life where everyone talks about everything under the sun in terms of numbers. So next time you're working with your team on the breakthrough project for the quarter, remember the question, "If A completes work in 30 days and B completes the same work in 20 days. If they work together, then in how many day will they complete their work?".