Seeing as Understanding: The Importance of Visual Mathematics for our Brain and Learning

Abstract

A few weeks ago the silence of my Stanford office was interrupted by a phone call. A mother called to tell me that her 5-year old daughter had come home from school crying because her teacher had not allowed her to count on her fingers. A few weeks afterwards, when I told my undergraduate mathematics class that visual mathematics was really important, one of them asked: but it is only for low levels of math, isn’t it?