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Innumeracy, along with its mathematical flipside, numeracy, has long been a fascination for me, and articles or books about it tend to grab my attention. Math, arguably the language of technology, is important to each of our lives whether we ever master it or not.

Innumeracy is like illiteracy - it is the basic inability to comprehend the meaning of what plain-old added, subtracted, divided, multiplied, or otherwise statistically manipulated numbers are telling us. Innumeracy is a stumble over numbers rather than words. Importantly, both afflictions hinder a person's access to - if not success in - the modern world.

The dangers of innumeracy are that people can be easily manipulated to believe things represented in numbers without making proper distinctions.

I suffer from innumeracy in varying degrees, as many of us do, like when I tell someone, "I've told you a million times." In truth, I may have mentioned something at most a few dozen times, which is substantially less than one million. That is the problem. Innumeracy leads to unfair exaggerations or underestimated dismissals.

The boundaries of our numerical capacities are far closer than most of us realize. Studies have shown that humans can instantly recognize up to four objects. Beyond four we have to count five . . . six . . . seven . . .

Recently, my innumeracy interest was refreshed through the serendipity of the Internet. I received an e-invitation to attend a lecture by Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, to be held at the PARC Forum in Palo Alto, Calif. (PARC is Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center where various cool, now-ubiquitous technologies were birthed.)

Fat chance that I could attend since the lecture was in California, but I followed up on some of the links about Norvig that the e-mail provided.

One led to an essay by Norvig entitled "Reporters and Parrots." Being a columnist, or a reporter-once-removed, the topic caught my attention.

Norvig highlights innumeracy (unqualified numeric exaggeration) as one of four complaints about news reporting these days. The other points are parroting (simply repeating claims as facts), deception (protecting corporate media interests), and equal-time (giving very marginal interests equal time in the news - another form of innumeracy).

On the academic front, much of the debate about the condition of our schools today is about innumeracy, voiced in the complaint about how unprepared our students and graduates are for challenging career fields like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and the well-paid and highly demanded jobs based on those skills.

I trace my curiosity about numbers and their comprehension back to my struggles in my college calculus classes, where long-dead mathematicians' theorems tried to impart their brilliant insights about our world through their quantification equations and resulting brainpowers.

I often found my anthropological side wandering to the history of mathematics and how we came to our current mathematical frameworks. Unfortunately, the professors and the rest of my faster math classmates took the theorems at face-value and moved on.

My untested hunch is that a better grounding in the anthropology of math would help more people to understand the abstract thoughts required by math, and help to reduce our collective innumeracy.

One of the best books on the history of math is "From One to Zero," by Georges Ifrah. Ifrah starts our journey from one to zero with tribute to sheepherders, some of our earliest counters, who used stones to keep track their flocks: One sheep out, one stone out of the bag. One sheep back, one stone back in the bag. Zero, the absence of a quantity, is a fairly recent abstraction that evolved after eons of human time.

In a famous quote about the vagaries of political innumeracy, the late Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois said, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."

So often our world is explained to us in terms of numbers we need to know to understand the world - if not our taxes.