India is Home to Many Mental Calculators
Fourteen-year-old Aaryan Shukla of Maharashtra recently set six world records during a Guinness World Records event in Dubai. He is now the fastest human to mentally add 100 four-digit numbers, add 200 four-digit numbers, add 50 five-digit numbers, divide a 20-digit number by a ten-digit number, multiply two five-digit numbers, and multiply two eight-digit numbers.
Aaryan is certainly extraordinary, but it’s worth noting that there are countless kids in India who possess an amazing ability to mentally calculate. Where can you find these kids? At a neighborhood market, selling vegetables and other items.
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, MIT economists and Nobel Prize laureates, recently co-authored a study that compares the arithmetic skills of “market kids” with “school kids” in India. They found that market kids can do a lot of mental calculations, but struggle with school-type math problems. School kids, in turn, struggle with the type of calculations done in a market.
Market kids, the researchers found, have certain tricks that help them calculate quickly. For example, if they have to multiply 43 by 11, they first multiply 43 by 10 and then add 43, which gives them the answer: 473. “The market kids are able to exploit base 10, so they do better on base 10 problems,” Duflo told MIT News. “The school kids have no idea. It makes no difference to them. The market kids may have additional tricks of this sort that we did not see.”
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Compiled and partly written by Indian humorist MELVIN DURAI, author of the novel Bala Takes the Plunge.
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