I recently saw an episode of 60 Minutes about Jacob Barnett, a 13 year old boy who is currently attending advanced physics classes at a local university and was portrayed by the show as being a child prodigy/genius. In the interview, he demonstrates how he's able to perform mathematical transformations in his head by visualizing the numbers as colored shapes. As he explains in the linked clip:This is 2 * 27:  He visualizes multiplying 2 by 27 as a series of colored triangles.Is this a known phenomenon, and if so, does it have a name? Do other individuals visualize mathematics like this? Or is this just a 12-year old kid... embellishing (to be polite) his thought process?
Is there a term for individuals who can visualize numbers and advanced mathematics?
terminology;intelligence;problem solving;mathematical ability
Sounds like a form of Synesthesia, in particular it sounds like Number Form Synesthesia mixed with Grapheme-color Synesthesia:A number form is a mental map of numbers, which automatically and involuntarily appears whenever someone who experiences number-forms thinks of numbers. Number forms were first documented and named by Francis Galton in The Visions of Sane Persons. Later research has identified them as a type of synesthesia. In particular, it has been suggested that number-forms are a result of cross-activation between regions of the parietal lobe that are involved in numerical cognition and spatial cognitionIt doesn't seem exactly like what he does but it could be a form of it. It's hard to imagine just how it would be to perceive the world as a synesthesic person does.It sounds like he's learned to apply his visual-spatial skills to arrange the number forms to aid his calculations.Synesthesia is covered in detail in the book Synesthesia: a union of the senses, though I'm not aware of any specific case studies on individuals with this exact set of skills.A term to describe people with Synestesia is Synesthesic.