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Seeing this list of silly things one might find useful in high school math contests made me nostalgic for those days...
by omaranto 16y ago
Seeing this list of silly things one might find useful in high school math contests made me nostalgic for those days...
- jacquesm 16y agoThey're not that silly actually. Division is the most 'complicated' of the arithmetic operations and if you rely on doing sums in your head frequently then knowing such shortcuts can speed up the calculations considerably. It also helps in checking results of other calculations.
- xyzzyz 16y agoSilly? Some people do math for a living.
- alextgordon 16y agoThose people don't get paid by the hour, so they use a calculator :)
- omaranto 16y agoI do math for a living. Needing to now whether a small integer is divisible by 7 rarely comes up. And when it dos we tend to let dumb machines handle the easy stuff, leaving humans free to think.
- Panoramix 16y agoI find this kind of things extremely handy in my everyday job. Especially in meetings, since often you are forced to do mental arithmetic to estimate the magnitude of a parameter, etc. Abusing the calculator can put your brain in poor shape, just like muscles!
- omaranto 16y agoSeriously? You use divisibility tests to make estimations? I hope nothing much is riding on those estimates...