Solving a numbers problem

Woman with mathematics disability works to find solutions for others

ATaranaki woman who can’t read numbers is helping to open doors to thousands of other people who struggle with maths.

Hannah Hughson, 28, can’t read speed limits, shop prices or recipes.

“Those [road] signs don’t mean anything to me. At 50, I’d be going 5k,” she said.

She avoids shopping and cooking. But in a two-year collaboration with Gary Sharpe, her maths support tutor at the Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki (WITT), she has analysed the numeracy tests of 177,000 New Zealanders to find our most common mistakes and suggest ways to fix them.

Sharpe, who has been “in tears at times working with Hannah”, believed she had opened the door for others suffering from “dyscalculia” — when wiring in the brain lacks the connections to understand numbers.

“Hannah is the most profoundly dyscalculic person we have tested,” he said.

She was good at all her other subjects at school and, as the daughter of an accountant, she was expected to be good at maths.

But she wasn’t. Her parents tried everything; including specialist tuition. Then, she finally found someone who refused to give up: 66-yearold Sharpe, a former mechanic.

Sharpe’s first thought was to dodge the maths with a calculator. But Hughson couldn’t read symbols such as “+, -, x” and developed her own system of always pressing one key for add, another for subtract, and so on.

“So I took all the keys off and swapped them over to what she was using,” he said.

Eventually he replaced symbols with words.

“‘Add’ I can read,” Hughson explained. “‘One’ I can read, ‘two’ I can read.”

But Sharpe was still puzzled because ● ● ●