Alex Bellos>Perhaps this is a good argument for introducing study of the abacus into the maths curriculum. Calculation with the abacus uses the "visiospatial" hemisphere of the brain, unlike calculation with pen and paper, which uses the "linguistic" hemisphere. Given the links between memory and calculation, if spatial memory is an untapped resource maybe spatial calculation is too. When I was researching this for my book, I failed to find anyone doing serious research into the educational benefits of the abacus. Recently, Michael Frank at Stanford has been looking into it however: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/august/abacus-mental-math-080311.html ------- Naah, if there were anything to this, the Chinese would have discovered Pascal's triangle centuries before Pascal, found the value of 2F1[-n,b;c|1] centuries before Vandermonde, and found pi ~ 355/113 a millennium before *Adriaan Anthonisz.* --rwg