So today I Was browsing the web and came across this math magic.com site, which led me to this forum.
My impressions of this forum as well as math-magic is that it seems really, really cool.
To be honest I have no interest in taking the Number Sense exam or anything. I am just fascinated by all of these tricks for mental computation. I'd love to try and master all of this stuff....as its will most definitely be a cool skill-set to have in life.
Anyway, that is enough for my introduction.
I have just been using this website for practice : http://www.buildquiz.com/speed_math.swf. I have for the past couple of hours been focusing on "Medium Multiplication"
I was browsing through the math-magic site, and I saw that its hard to find any short-cut related to multiplying two prime numbers, such as 53*43. Do you guys have any good ways to approach problems like this?
What about a problem like 55*63? My initial inclination was to try to reduce 55 to 11.. But obv that can't be done. It doesn't seem like there are any "Set" Tricks to approach this and I would have to break a problem like this down logically.
Help would be appreciated. Also, how long did it take for you guys to become good at this sort of thing? I am prepared to practice regularly. How often do you guys recommend I work on my skills? And what approach do you feel is best? I read in a previous post that I should check out the practice problems at Texasmath.org...(Note that I have no interest in solving some of the problems involving integrals, roman numerals, polygons, etc).
-- Edited by Balls_Rider on Wednesday 31st of March 2010 09:06:25 PM
