Number Sense

Number sense is the hypothesis that some animals, and particularly humans, possess a biologically determined ability to represent and manipulate numerical quantities. The mathematician Tobias Dantzig first named the concept in his 1930 book Number: The Language of Science, and the psychologist Stanislas Dehaene popularized the term in his own 1997 book The Number Sense. Psychologists distinguish two components of it: an approximate number system that supports estimating magnitude, and a parallel individuation system that tracks individual objects, typically only below four. In education, number sense is treated as central to early elementary mathematics, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has made it a focus area for pre-kindergarten through second-grade instruction, with an active line of research devoted to designing and testing teaching strategies meant to build it in young children.