Math Signs

If I burrowed down into it, the root of my struggles in grappling with math is probably impatience. I try to skip steps and when solving equations or writing a proof that's a no-no. I cannot imagine how much harder it would be if I were also hearing impaired, but it turns out that there are plenty of people who have significant hearing loss who work in mathematics. And they've developed special signs for many of the mathematical terms that they use in their work.

What's interesting in reading this interview with Dr. Jess Boland, a British physicist, is learning that the special math signs are like many everyday signs: They often visually represent some aspect of the spoken term that they're translating.

Many people, including your humble blogger, have learned how to "fingerspell" and even memorized a few simple signs in order to try to be able to help deaf people either get to someone who signs better, or at least to a piece of paper and a pen. But fingerspelling is slow going and easy to goof up. It's not how we talk anyway, we talk in words. The words are combinations of sounds, not a series of letters we have to put together in our heads.

Folks who can't hear, though, don't recognize the combination of sounds. So sign language creates a visual sign to represent each word -- in this way it's a lot more like the Chinese language in which  words or parts of words are often represented by a different symbol rather than a string of characters.

The sign often has some visual clue to an aspect of the word it represents. The American Sign Language (ASL) sign for "man" involves a gesture starting from the forehead, because men used to wear hats. The sign for "boy" is the sign letter "b" opened and closed as though on the brim of a cap, which is something that boys rather than grown men used to wear.

Sign language also operates according to a different grammar. ASL, for example, may have a different subject-verb order than spoken English or drop definite articles. There is a term for signing the way people speak, called Signing Exact English (SEE). Sometimes deaf people learn that as well, especially if they work with a lot of hearing people and rely on lipreading or written communication. If the hearing people in that environment learn sign in order to communicate, they may find SEE easier to pick up than ASL.

In any event, Dr. Boland uses British Sign Language (BSL). It's not the same as ASL, probably varying even more than British English does from American English. ASL users, when spelling a word, will use just one hand, while BSL users will spell with two. The irony is that if she were signing and speaking at the same time -- Dr. Boland has experienced most of her hearing loss fairly recently -- hearing Americans would understand her better than ASL users would because of the differences in the two.

At the link you can see short video clips of Dr. Boland demonstrating some of the specially developed math-related signs; there is a YouTube channel devoted to them as well. Fair warning, the channel only shows you the signs. Which means that while I can now sign "pyroclastic density current" in BSL, I still have to look it up before I have the slightest clue as to what it means.