Math Is Cool, Again and Still

  

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Nancy Staples contributes a second guest entry to Math Hub.

You've probably seen the YouTube video of the mind-boggling "mathemagician" Arthur Benjamin, professor of math at Harvey Mudd College. It's an old video, but getting new play now that the gentleman has written a book. To the extent that he reveals his secret or that any mortal could actually apply it, it relies on storing and retrieving each number as a word, like "cookie" or "fission".

Of course, what Benjamin does isn't really "magic", and we don't want kids seeing math as something magical. Certainly, a robust working memory in combination with a warehouse of accessible stored information plays an important role. Most important, though, is a keen understanding of how numbers work, ways they can be composed, decomposed, and rearranged to make complex computations much simpler. Once you learn the system, mathematical tricks don't seem so magical. That's where we want our kids to be. If Benjamin's video helps motivate kids to learn to unlock that system, I'll take it.

By the way, if you want to talk about getting into some big numbers, Benjamin later turned up on Stephen Colbert's show, and that's a nice seven-digit audience to reach with a positive message about math.

Photo credit: http://www.math.hmc.edu/~benjamin/mathemagics.htm