Section 13.12 Small Number Around the World
Written by: Veselin Jungic
Illustrated by: Lila Mohammed
Collection of retellings of a mathematical-thinking-related story in various languages
In early September 2024, I started inviting my colleagues, collaborators, and my former students to help me “make a collection of the cartoon in various languages” by sending me their “mother tongue translation of the English text.” Of course, I contacted only those people who previously shared with me this kind of information.
In my message, I explained: “The point that I'd like to make is that love for mathematics and storytelling unite us across continents, cultures, ages, genders, and ranks.”
What followed was a two-month-long emotionally intense learning journey.
The outcome was a collection of sixty-eight authentic retellings of the story narrated in the following fifty languages: Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia (2), Bemba, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Regular and Simplified), Croatian, Czech (2), Dutch, English, Finnish (2), French, German (3), Gikuyu, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi (3), Hungarian, Italian (2), Irish (Gaelic) (2), Japanese (2), Kazakh, Kiswahili, Korean, Luhya, Macedonian, Nepali, Norwegian (2), Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian (2), Russian (2), Serbian, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (2), Swahili, Tagalog, Tla'amin, Turkish (2), Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Wolof.
Thank you to everyone who, directly or indirectly, contributed to the project!
- Veselin Jungic
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