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I'm a mathematician. When I was in grade school they told us to memorize up to twelve. But I figured I could skip the evens, because doubling is easy, so I woul
by jimhefferon 5y ago
I'm a mathematician. When I was in grade school they told us to memorize up to twelve. But I figured I could skip the evens, because doubling is easy, so I would just memorize the odds. One is trivial, three and five are simple, as is eleven. There is an easy algorithm for mine. So I memorized seven and called it done.
When I think of the thousands of multiplications I've done since then, it's clear I was a dope and my teachers were perfectly right.
- lupire 5y agoThe only unintuitive element of the times table is 8*7=54.
- mdp2021 5y ago"8, 7, 54" !? I do not get the joke. What do you mean? Suppose now somebody threw in that expression seriously. Would not that be an admonition to learn the tables and learn each element properly (do, check, memorize; do, check, memorize, check, check, check)?
- karaterobot 5y agoNot sure if there's a separate in-joke involved, but 7x8=54 was a joke in the article.
- commandlinefan 5y agoI noticed that there's really only a 4x4 square in the multiplication tables (6-9) that aren't obvious, and since the table itself is mirrored along the diagonal, there are only really 9 entries you truly need to memorize: 6x6, 6x7, 6x8, 6x9, 7x7, 7x8, 7x9, 8x8 and 8x9.