I saw this cartoon on someone's Facebook page. Yeah, yeah, imaginary numbers are great for puns. That's not the math I'm interested in here. The way I interpreted this column, the 8 and 4 are the parents of the 6. True, they could be two "adult" numbers of any sort (teacher and parent, two teachers, whatever), but I interpreted them as parents I think in part because 6 is the average of 8 and 4. It makes sense: we think of children as being the genetic combination of their parents ("He has mom's eyes and dad's nose") and in many ways the average. Thinking purely about skin color, mine is about the average of my dark-skinned father and white mother.
So what other questions can we ask or think about?
- Thinking about using the arithmetic mean, wouldn't all these numerical children hit a certain limit at some point? (Kind of like how people say that in 100 years everyone will have light brown skin?)
- What are other ways we could do genetic counseling for two numbers trying to procreate? Geometric mean?
- What traits are dominant or recessive (or something else)? Two even numbers or two odd numbers will create an even child, but an even and odd will never pass on their even-ness/odd-ness to the next generation. What about multiples or
- How could you do some eugenics to make sure you weeded out "undesirable" offspring (uh oh, I am taking this to a dark place...).
- How far can I take this metaphor before it starts to break down?
Maybe the most interesting question would just to give kids two numbers and ask what number their child will be. I wonder what kids would come up with. I especially wonder what elementary schoolers would come up with versus high schoolers. My guess: elementary schoolers would be more creative.
