Archive for the ‘Fast Arithmetic’ Category
Saturday, March 8th, 2008
Brian Foley runs a web-site, Math Mojo and a blog, The Math Mojo Chronicles. The web-site aims to make, in Brian's words, "Math meaningful." While I enjoy the site, I struggled to explain what Math Mojo was about until I found this description in the What is Math Mojo page:
Math ...
Posted in Reviews, Math Phobia, Fast Arithmetic, Education | 3 Comments »
Friday, February 15th, 2008
Last November I wrote about the Trachtenberg system of speed mathematics and showed one of the techniques - multiplying an arbitrarily large number by 12 with great ease. In this article I want to show you why the technique for multiplying by 12 works, share two more of the Trachtenberg ...
Posted in Fast Arithmetic, Algebra | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
Last month I blogged about mathemagician Arthur Benjamin and his amazing mental Math feats. Benjamin is a master of doing arithmetic in his head with lots of digits involved. In particular, he's able to square a 5-digit number without writing down partial results. How does he do it? I picked ...
Posted in Trick, Fast Arithmetic, Algebra | 10 Comments »
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
There's an interesting web-site, brainetics.com, that is all about doing mental Math quickly. I have to confess that while I know quite a few mental Math tricks and while I've written quite a number of posts and made several videos about mental Math tricks I'm not particularly fast at applying ...
Posted in Game, Fun, Fast Arithmetic | 6 Comments »
Saturday, January 12th, 2008
There are numerous introductions to Vedic mathematics on the web. I won't be doing a general introduction to Vedic Math now. In this article I want to explore one particular Vedic mathematics technique, using something called bases, to optimize certain multiplication problems.
This technique is extremely powerful and it takes getting ...
Posted in Fast Arithmetic, Algebra | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
In case it's not enough that young chimps have better numerical memory than adult humans it now seems that monkeys can perhaps impress their friends with mental Math tricks. A new study shows that monkeys can do mental Math. The article states:
"Rhesus macaque monkeys performed nearly as well as college ...
Posted in Fun, Fast Arithmetic | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 17th, 2007
Check out this amazing video of Mental mathemagician Arthur Benjamin performing calculation feats in front of an audience.
The video comes from the TED.com blog. TED is an organization dedicated to changing the world by spreading important ideas. TED, which stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design", but whose scope is much broader ...
Posted in Fast Arithmetic | 4 Comments »
Monday, December 10th, 2007
Here's a video on how to quickly square a 2-digit number. The technique is based on this algebra:
If you have a number with digits "ab" then the number is 10a+b.
(10a+b)^2 = 100a^2+20ab+b^2.
If you enjoy this video check out all of the Wild About Math! mathcasts.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wjxgz6r-_U[/youtube]
SHARETHIS.addEntry({
title: "Mathcast #4: Quick squaring ...
Posted in Mathcast, Fast Arithmetic, Algebra | 9 Comments »
Friday, December 7th, 2007
I can't prove this but I bet that doing lots of mental Math can help slow down aging. In studying a number of techniques for doing fast arithmetic I notice a number of mental skills at play:
Pattern recognition. Many tricks involve recognizing and exploiting a pattern.
Visualization of processes. Multiplying large ...
Posted in Fast Arithmetic | 7 Comments »
Thursday, December 6th, 2007
A few people were underwhelmed with my video on how to multiply together a pair of 2-digit numbers without writing down partial results. They didn't see a time savings. Fair enough, although not needing to write anything but the three (or four) digits of the answer can be a nice ...
Posted in Fast Arithmetic, Algebra | 6 Comments »
