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[ewx]

[Poll #311278]

(If you want to quantify this, interpret the questions in terms of mean scores on a hypothetical arithmetic test.)

Comments

[simont]

I've never felt that I have good arithmetic. If I try to work things out in my head, I keep forgetting bits of the numbers I'm working on and having to go back and do it again. And again. And again. I usually get there in the end, but whenever I try to do arithmetic in my head it annoys me how bad I am at it.

That said, at pizza on Mondays I see lots of people around me jotting down their share of the bill on a napkin or a calculator, whereas it's a matter of pride for me to work it out entirely in my head at the start of the meal and keep it in my memory until the time comes to pay, so I suppose if I can do that at all I must count as good by a relative definition.

Mathematicians, well, I wrote "average", but only (as it were) on average. They seem to divide between people with unbelievable mental arithmetic and people who get scared if they see more than one digit at a time in a proof. And I see no reason this shouldn't be the case, since in general there's not much arithmetic to be done in proper maths. (Number theory might be an exception, but I'm not even convinced of that since these days it's probably all about 300-digit primes and not even a souped-up Carol Vorderman could work with those in her head...)

[senji.livejournal.com]

I find I can't remember my pizza bill number during the course of a pizza :).

On the other hand, I'm slightly better than the Vord-at-the-Board at Countdown numbers games, so my mental arithmetic isn't too bad under the right sort of pressure...