My daughter is good at math. But when she makes mistakes, I like to remind her that of all the skills a working mathematician needs, speed and not making mistakes are fairly far down the list. Being able to recognize mistakes and fix them requires much deeper cognition than avoiding them in the first place... Cris On Feb 13, 2015, at 9:12 AM, Charles Greathouse <charles.greathouse@case.edu> wrote:
Realistically, how long does it really take to master the multiplication tables?
Many years of hard study for me just to be able to squeak by. I had to return to it years later, as well, to complete the process -- I didn't memorize all of it originally, I just used various identities along with what I had learned. Not everyone is gifted with a good memory.
Charles Greathouse Analyst/Programmer Case Western Reserve University
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 10:11 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Realistically, how long does it really take to master the multiplication tables?
I grew up in a large family, and my siblings drilled these tables to one another; it became a bit of a game, and didn't really take very long.
If someone had asked us to memorize the sqrt table, we probably would have done that, as well.
I also recall doing a prime sieve by hand shortly after learning how to count, because I was fascinated by how random the results were.
We now know that the capacity of human memory is easily in the Gigabytes, so there's no worry about filling up a limited capacity.
At 12:37 AM 2/13/2015, Bill Gosper wrote:
http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/11/stanford-professor-says-memorizing-multipl...
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