How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?

Re:How fast should you accelerate your kid in math? by Aeolun on Sunday July 30, 2023 @12:02AM (#36927696)

But it’s the principles that matter, not the tables. If you understand the principles you can easily figure out 563*3557. If you only know the tables you get stuck on 16x21.

Though I agree that it’s convenient if multiplying anything under 10 is a idempotent action :)

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Re:How fast should you accelerate your kid in math? by spywaregorilla on Sunday July 30, 2023 @03:21AM (#36928703)

16 x 21 = (16 * 2 * 10) + 16 => (8 * 4 * 10) + 16 => 320 + 16 => 336

Is... that not how most people do mental math? I instinctively reduce everything to familiar patterns largely based on single digits numbers tables.

563 * 3557 is about 600 * 4000 => 6 * 4 * 100000 => about 2.4M

Are other people doing the standard algorithm visualized somehow?

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Re:How fast should you accelerate your kid in math? by tomp on Sunday July 30, 2023 @03:35AM (#36928781)

I urge you to "figure out" 5633557 in base 9.

Guess what? You'll first need to manually* derive the approximate "multiplication tables" (for individual digits), only then you'll be able to multiply multi-digit numbers.

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