News for your accountant

Monkeys reveal brain is hard-wired for counting - life - 30 October 2007 - New Scientist

While monkeys might not yet have mastered calculus, recent studies have shown that they can learn understand some basic aspects of arithmetic and, in a rare case, multiplication.

Andreas Nieder at the University of Tübingen in Germany and colleagues trained two rhesus monkeys to count by showing them various numbers of dots on a screen followed by Arabic numerals....

"Although monkeys don't have language they can understand a symbol and what it refers to," she explains.

Nieder, meanwhile, believes that the monkeys can count to far higher numbers. "I'm convinced that they could go to infinity," he says.

There must be a joke to be made somehow, or a funny passage in a faux Douglas Adams book, about the very idea of a roomful of monkeys counting to infinity. Go to it, comedy writers.