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DD3 - my ND child (or so I thought)... the following happened at dinner last night:

DD: "I know what 0+2 is".
Me: What?
DD: 2
Me: Uh... (she giggles). What's 0+3?
DD: 3
DH: What's 0+5?
DD: 5
DH: What's 1+2?
DD: 2 (whew - not whew in that way... but, she IS really normal, right?)
DH: No, look 1+2 (holds up 1 finger on one hand and 2 on the other)
DD: Duh, Free (3).

The DUH part cracked me up!

We've (sadly) NEVER really worked on math with her (that's what we get for ASSuming she was the normal one)... apparently we need to start, huh? I know this doesn't equate to genius or even giftedness, but I honestly had NO idea she even understood what the word "plus" meant!

I think zero is WAY harder conceptually than plus, although that's pretty great too!! Wow.

A few weeks back my ds9 had a little disagreement with an older friend, and then later Dh about whether infinity times 0 is zero or not. Ds held firm that there was no answer, despite my DH explaining several different ways about how nothing of anything is nothing, therefore zero.
I had to look it up, I wasn't sure...turns out there is no answer, infinity just doesn't work that way. I was surprised, especially about how ds stuck to his guns.
Doesn't equate to genius either, but certainly interesting!

Good intuition!! Quantity has a quality all to itself!!

Our daughter is helping GS10 get ready for his 4-H dog show next week. She picked up 2 pages, double-sided, with questions all about dogs-- breeds, care & feeding, showing, etc. She gave them to him last night and less than a half hour later he came to me and asked me to ask him the questions. We were moving right down the page when daughter came into the room and said, "J, have you read all those already?!" She was stunned that he had read all of them, not to mention he remembered all the answers!
I've been real low-key about saying anything to her about his mental ability. She has 8 & 6 year old girls and I really don't comparisons that result in hard feelings.

Good for you for being sensitive to your DD, OHG. Not that I'm surprised, of course, but it's not always easy.

Do you know this book, Chris? Charles Seife, "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea," Viking, 2000. Very cool! (He talks quite a bit about the relationship between zero and infinity.)

This isn't much of a brag, but it cracked me up, and thought maybe it might make somebody else chuckle, too:

I was weeding the vegetable garden this afternoon (I am in a losing battle with the redroot this year), and Chico (4) came out to join me, Tilley hat on head, comic book under one arm, little red Adirondack chair in the other hand. He plunked down his chair, opened his book, and said, "Mummy, I'm just going to sit here, read Little Lulu, and eat snow peas until my gizzard bursts!"

Maybe you had to be there....

peace
minnie

If I shared this anywhere else but here, I'd get shunned by our community for certain.

My son and his teacher come out of his classroom together one afternoon a few months back (3rd grade) and the teacher says, "Your son taught the class about the square root of negative one today!" My son brought it up when they were working with the series of squares on the multiplication table.

Another child asked about taking the square root of -4 (or something like that) and the teacher demonstrated on her calculator that it would result in an error... just like dividing by zero.

Well... not only was my guy confident (brave? stupid?) enough to contradict the teacher, but also willing to bet against the calculator.

On a lark, he and I had discussed it a few weeks earlier when he was practicing math with negative numbers. No, he didn't figure it out on his own (that would be REALLY scary), but he did fully grasp the concept and can use it in simple problems like (2i)^2 = -4 and so forth.

The teacher said she'd forgotten all about it and was tickled at being reminded by a 3rd grader.

I'm still constantly amazed at what he can process.

That's cool, Dandy!

I have a little anecdote that's more of a laugh than a brag:

Today DS6 needed to have a blood test done. When it was his turn to sit in the chair he said, "I'm not too thrilled about this...I think I'm going to want my memory modified!"

The phlebotomist laughed and told him that she would be happy to do that as soon as the procedure was done. She said she would take him to a little room and he would wake up and wonder why he had a bandaid on his arm.

I was glad she went along with his fantasy, it seemed to distract him and no tears were shed

I am so thrilled with Wolf(almost 5) today! He had been having some problems with ones and tens columns and carrying (not in his head, just on paper) and so we practiced with pennies and dimes (if there are more than ten pennies after they are added you change ten in for one dime). He picked it up really quickly and then added 1,234,567,890 + 1,234,567,890 all by himself. He was so pleased with himself. AND he seems to have figured out where to put the commas now! A good day.

Thanks Minnie, we will check out the book. And I like the story about your pea-pickin' little one.

As usual all these stories are fun and exciting!