Alex Bellos
speaker
186 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2014
last heard Jun 2014
Alex Bellos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, so the reason why four is bad luck, it's the unlucky number, not just in China, but in Japan, Korea, in East Asia, is because four sounds like death.
So you just don't want to say four because it sounds like you're being morbid.
And it is the case that certain hotels don't have a fourth floor, just the way that certain hotels in the West don't have floor 13.
Sometimes planes don't have a fourth row.
In the US, where they have very good demographic statistics, it turns that amongst Chinese and Japanese Americans, the number of them dying by heart attack rises on the fourth of each month, therefore showing that it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Everyone is so scared on the fourth that people are more likely to have heart attacks.
How ironic is that, that you'd have thought, oh my God, that's crazy because obviously four is no different than five and six, but they're internalising this fear.
Yet again, they have these amazing numeracies.
So I think that in the UK, a big issue is maths education and this idea that the UK is slightly behind or maybe a long way behind the Asian nations in terms of teaching numeracy and basic arithmetic.
But also what I was discovering is that the Asian nations are a lot more kind of superstitious and have a lot more fun in games and play with numbers and think numbers have personality and numbers are spiritual, this, that and the other.
So actually, I would say that the fact that you might have a favorite number or think that a certain number has a personality doesn't mean that you are...
anti-science or not good at maths.
It's kind of completely different.
And if anything, I would encourage people to treat numbers as their friends and to embrace all these things because it makes them less scary.
Maybe I was being disingenuous when I say I didn't have a favorite number because, I mean, there's no one single number that I think, well, that's my guy.
But I was born on the 22nd of the 11th.
You double the month and you get the day.
And I lived in Brazil for five years.
And in Brazil, people are quite numerological and they love astrology and things like that.
And people, you know, they want to know your birth date to sort of do the numbers on them.
Showing 161–180 of 186 · page 9 of 10
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