When I was teaching university level mathematics, there were many people in my classes who couldn't do fast matrix multiplication or even fast multiplication. T

When I was teaching university level mathematics, there were many people in my classes who couldn't do fast matrix multiplication or even fast multiplication. The inevitable result was that they had to constantly drop from the higher level of abstraction that we were trying to learn, to the lower level abstraction of arithmetic, and failing to learn the higher level of abstraction. On this forum, I will say, imagine your object-oriented programming language can build all sorts of abstractions but can't multiply numbers. So every time you have to multiply numbers in your algorithm, you have to instead write a few lines of assembly code that do the same thing. How much efficiency would you lose. Just practice multiplying numbers.