Why Do Numbers Sometimes Feel Like They’re Hiding Things?

Numbers can hide shapes. Imagine you have a bunch of blocks and you stack them in different ways, sometimes they look like squares, triangles, or even stars! You can count how many blocks there are, but the way they're arranged makes hidden pictures appear. That’s what number patterns do, they make shapes out of numbers just by counting.

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Examples

  1. Stacking blocks to form a triangle
  2. Counting candies one by one and making rows of them
  3. Sitting in chairs around a table, each row having more people than the last

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