The Human Calculator
Willem (Will) Klein was a Dutch Mathematician who astounded the world with his abilities to do complex calculations in his head. There are many interesting stories about his life – check this one out. Also, click on the image below for a short (3min) youtube video to see him in action. Note that Willem needs to talk out loud to work through some of the problems.
In Steven Smith’s article about Will Klein he notes, “Klein’s interest in calculation began at age 8, when he discovered factoring. “At school we had to factor numbers up to 500. Then I continued on to 10000, 15000, 20000, 25000. As you got so often the same combinations, it is logical that if you know that 2537 is 43 times 59, and you’re doing a little show for the godmother of a neighbor celebrating her eighteenth birthday, and they ask you for 43 times 59, you recognize straightaway 2537.” Although Klein never set about to learn the multiplication table up to 100 by 100, he gradually acquired it from repeatedly encountering the same combinations. Klein learned the multiplication tables up to 100 by 100, the squares of integers up to 1000, the cubes of numbers up to 100 and roughly all prime numbers below 10’000. He also committed to memory the decimal logarithms to five places of the first 150 integers.
