Blog Response to Arthur Benjamin does "Mathemagic"
In
Arthur Benjamin’s presentation at TED he decided to show off a very unique
talent of his. His talent was being able to do amazing calculations in his
head, calculations that would normally require us to use a calculator. These calculations ranged from squaring 2 digit numbers to squaring 5 digit numbers
in his head (note that squaring a 5 digit number requires a 10 digit
calculator). Not only were these calculations amazing but his method of doing
them was amazing. He said the steps he was doing out loud in his head at one
time and instead of just remembering numbers he converted the numbers into
words which he would later convert into numbers. During his calculations words
such as cookie could be heard as he thought aloud. Arthur Benjamin’s talent is definitely one of a kind and amazing.
Not
only was his talent amazing, his presentation style was great. He got the
audience very involved and he even pulled some of them up on stage and had them
do the calculations he was doing on calculators to prove the validity of his
answers. He also made the audience laugh,a lot. He told jokes throughout the
presentation that didn’t get the audience off topic, but just made it easier
for them to understand and connect to his insane calculations.
I
really enjoyed this presentation because I love the idea of being able to solve
things in your head and use symbols such as he did with cookie to represent
more complex ideas. I may not be able to square 5 digit numbers in my head such
as he did but I love to figure out word puzzles and other things. Arthur
Benjamin really stunned me with his performance and it defiantly was put
correctly under the jaw dropping category.
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