ABSTRACT
Genes and environment interact and it is no surprise that emergent maths is shaped by the environment. Education has long recognised the importance of building on children’s intuitive number skills. Translating from concrete experience to abstract knowledge is fundamental to acquiring complex mathematical skills. This perspective is reinforced by cultural anthropologists’ documentation of cultural variation in mathematical ability. At least one society, the Piraha, a remote tribe of hunter-gatherers living in the Amazon, have been shown to entirely lack linguistic numeral terms for expressing quantity, not even possessing words for ‘one’ vs. ‘many’. Historical perspectives on mathematics also reveal the commonalities and differences in the trajectories of mathematical knowledge within different societies, which can partly explain contemporary cultural variation in maths. There are many examples of children being able to show their mathematical abilities or otherwise depending on the context in which they are in.
