No wonder I am not a math genius

Darren Barefoot talks about the correlation between girls' names and math proficiency. I read Freakonomics with a critical eye and while I understand the socio-economic argument around child naming, I don't see a big difference between Isabella and Abigail (incidentally, I have friends with children named each of those names....both will be wildly successful, I am sure).

I get that a name can create perceptions of a child before the person meets the child. But once the child has been met, I think perceptions are adjusted. Maybe that's easy for me to say, I was a tomboy with messy hair named Heather (which I perceive to be a girly name but I'm not sure if that's true linguistically). I never really felt it fit me, but I never felt that people treated me as a delicate flower because of it, so it was just more slightly annoying to have that name but never a really mattered.

Having a math major for a father probably had more of an influence on my math proficiency than anything else; truth be told, probably kept me from being an English major in college.