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Lesson 8 Animal Math
Class
No.
Name
(1) Birds do it. Dogs do it. Even salamanders do it. The ability to solve math problems is
showing up in all sorts of unlikely creatures. A growing body of research suggests that nature
a body of 1
probably discovered math long before people did.
(2) Mathematician Tim Pennings, for instance, was at the beach when he discovered that his
dog Elvis could do a type of math called calculus. "I would throw a ball into the water,"
Pennings says. "I noticed he'd run along the beach and then jump into the water and swim at
an angle toward the ball."
would
(3) That's a good strategy. Swimming is slow compared with running, so swimming all the
way to the ball would take longer even if the route is more direct. On the other hand, running
along the beach adds to the total distance Elvis must go to get to the ball. The best bet is a
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compromise between the two-running a certain distance along the beach before plunging
into the water.
(4) Pennings wondered if Elvis was instinctively taking the fastest possible route to the ball.
First, he measured how fast Elvis runs and swims. Next, he threw a tennis ball into the water
and let the dog go. Then he measured how far the dog ran and swam again and again.
Pennings had 35 sets of measurements. He went home and did some calculations, using
calculus to find the fastest route. Pennings says, "I figured out that where Elvis jumps in is
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pretty much perfect. He naturally knows the right spot to jump in."
(5) It took the grown man about an hour to come up with the same solution(that the 3-year-
old dog figured out in a fraction of a second) But is the dog really doing the math? "Elvis is
doing calculus in the sense that he somehow knows how to find the minimum time to get to
the ball," Pennings says.
(6) Pennings suspects that other creatures have naturally learned the most efficient ways to
do things over millions of years of evolution.
(7) Studying math skills in dogs to understand math in people might not be such a far-
fetched idea. In fact, some research is showing that babies and animals actually have a lot in
common when it comes to numbers.
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