Dolphins Are Math Geniuses

By Sara Tan Jul 18th 2012

Are you smarter than a fifth-grader? You may not be, but it turns out dolphins are. According to Discovery, dolphins are able to do complex, nonlinear math that involves addition, subtraction, multiplication and ratio comparisons.

Tim Leighton's study, which suggests dolphins might be mathematicians, was inspired by an episode of Discovery Channel's "Blue Planet."

"I immediately got hooked, because I knew that no man-made sonar would be able to operate in such bubble water. These dolphins were either 'blinding' their most spectacular sensory apparatus when hunting -- which would be odd, though they still have sight to reply on -- or they have a sonar that can do what human sonar cannot. Perhaps they have something amazing," said Leighton, a professor of ultrasonics and underwater acoustics at the University of Southampton.

Soon, Leighton teamed up with a couple of colleagues to figure out just what this ability was. After much research, they came to a conclusion that could possibly explain how dolphins achieved hunting success. Their sonar processing involved complex, nonlinear mathematics.

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"Provided the dolphin remembers what the ratios of the two pulses were, and can multiply the second echo by that and add the echoes together, it can make the fish 'visible' to its sonar," said Leighton. If the sonar model is able to be replicated, this could be a huge benefit for humans, especially those who use dolphins, such as the Navy.

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This is not the first study that has proved that dolphins are skilled at math. The Dolphin Research Center in Florida also proved that dolphins are able to grasp numerical concepts.

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