Table Of ContentThe Speed Math Bible
written by Yamada Takumi, with the special collaboration of Danilo Lapegna
Transform your brain into an electronic calculator and master the
mathematical strategies to triumph in every challenge!
"The 101 bibles" series
I - The Speed Math Bible
I'm quite sure we could all agree about a fact: the traditional way to teach
mathematics has a lot of structural problems, and in most of cases it doesn't
really help students to get confident with the subject. In fact, too many
students finish their schooling still having a real "mathematical illiteracy",
united with a burning hatred of everything concerning numbers and
operations.
In particular, talking about classic method of teaching mathematics, I'm
strongly of the opinion that:
It's really poor incentive for individual creativity: in fact, too many
times school will teach you that the proper method for performing a set
of calculations is "rigidly" one, and that everything should always be
made in the same way. This obviously can't do much more than boring
every student and generating the feeling that the matter itself, rather than
improving one's mental skills, actually shrinks them, gradually
transforming him/her into something that's more similar to an industrial
machine.
This book, however, is designed to go far beyond this restricted vision
and will teach you that the classic approach is not the only possible
approach and that every set of mathematical calculations can be
transformed into a deeply creative challenge.
The idea of mathematical "trick" is unjustly "demonised": very few
people know that they could perform very complex calculations just by
using extraordinarily rapid and effective numerical tricks.
And although it's widely accepted that learning the right balance
between tricks and rigour, creativity and structure, quick solutions and
harder solutions would be ideal for any student, schools usually continue
to prefer following a "complexity at all costs" that of course does not
nothing but alienating people from the matter.
It's promoted very little self-expression: too many people feel that
they have "nothing to share" with some mathematical concepts even
because the rigidity of the taught method prevents everyone from
expressing himself according to his talent, his wishes and his natural
predispositions.
But this book presents a completely different approach, since everything
among its pages will be deeply self-expression oriented, and the methods
shown here will teach you not just one, unquestionable method to solve
everything, but will give you the freedom to act according to what you
feel to be easier and more compatible with your natural attitude.
It's promoted very little curiosity and "researching spirit": math, as
taught from some very bad teachers, is presented as a grey and squared
world, made of endless repetitions and very few interesting things. But
thanks to this book you will start an original journey through the
singularities and the curiosities of the numbers world and you'll soon
find out how many interesting and beautiful things are hidden into its
deep harmony.
They speak very little about the real utility of mathematics: beyond
the ability to calculate your restaurant bill in an instant, the enormous
advantage you will gain in every official test or exam, or the awesome
progression of your logical and deductive faculties, you will discover
that mathematics has extraordinary strategic and creative applications
that will help you very often in your everyday challenges, giving you
that extra oomph in the administration of your personal finance, your
work, your studies, your health, your self-confidence and your strategic
intelligence when dealing with any kind of challenge.
Math is also vital engine and fuel for every little technological wonder
in the modern world. Computers and tablets could never exist today if
two mathematicians like John von Neumann and Alan Turing didn't
write the mathematical principles behind the first calculators. Internet
would never have existed if no one had developed the mathematical
principles the networks theory is based on. And the search engines and
social networks could never be born without the equations and
algorithms allowing each user to track, retrieve and organize documents,
web pages and profiles directly from a set of chaotic data. Moreover, the
inventors of Google and revolutionaries of the modern world, Larry
Page and Sergey Brin, are both graduates in mathematics.
What I'm trying to tell with this? Well, I'm not sure that every reader of
this book will end up founding the new Google, but I'm sure that a
greater mathematics competence in a world tuned on these frequencies
can help each of us to be more a protagonist and less a bare spectator of
it.
In other words, this book will not simply be a set of strategies for impressing
someone or increasing your academic performance, but will let you start a
journey through a pleasant and intriguing path of personal growth, along
which you'll learn to be more effective, creative, confident and, why not,
more intelligent.
In addition to that, I would like to give you a last advice: do not immediately
try to learn every method explained here, but go slowly, make notes, select
the techniques you like most and train yourself calmly and always taking your
time. This will help your mind to learn everything with much more ease and
less effort.
Enough said: now I can't do anything but wishing you all the best and, of
course, to enjoy your reading!
Yamada Takumi
About the authors:
Yamada Takumi and Danilo Lapegna are two Software Engineers working in
London as software developers and freelance writers. Their series of books,
"The 101 bibles", has been a great sales success in the self-publishing sector
in Italy, engaging thousands of electronic readers even in a moment of
economic instability for the Italian market. Now they're constantly expanding
their series with new books about personal and professional self-development
and their work represents an important reference point in the market.
For any kind of questions, help requests or, most of all, feedbacks, you can
write them at
"The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning, but
imagination."
(A De Morgan)
II - 5 mathematical strategies that will seriously
improve your life
We constantly count and make measurements in our everyday life: how many
hours must we sleep to feel really refreshed, what's our ideal body fat
percentage, how much time do we need to finish examining those documents,
after how many miles the gas tank of our car will be empty ... these are all
examples of everyday problems we constantly have to deal with, and that
obviously would require a solution as more effective as possible.
At the same time, however, we too often evaluate the factors involved in our
problems from a purely qualitative point of view rather than a quantitative
one, giving them purely empirical solutions. That is, for example, instead of
trying to understand the proper amount of sleeping hours for our body, we
too often try to sleep enough to feel relatively fit. Rather than calculating our
body fat percentage and adjusting our diet accordingly, we prefer some kind
of homemade diet that does not really pay attention to our real physiological
needs. And we do that despite it is intuitive that addressing these issues from
a quantitative point of view, and so measuring, evaluating, calculating the
quantities involved, would offer a greater efficiency to our actions, and so
would give us the ability to produce much more with many less expenses in
terms of time, money and resources.
Wait: this does not mean that you should run into some weird obsession for
rational assessments or for measuring every single aspect of reality. Your
existence of course needs even impulsively done actions, lessons learnt from
your mistakes and the coexistence with the inevitable unknown.
However, when you actually feel the need to get more results in a specific
field, a stronger mathematical "grip" on it could be a great strategy to
enhance your personal improvement. After all, the most successful companies
are exactly those doing the best in retrieving and analysing data about the
consequences of their behaviour. But how could we do that? Here's some
advices we could follow for the purpose:
Play giving marks more often. No, this has nothing to do with school.
If, for example, you really enjoy doing something, like, I don't know,
eating a particular type of food or going traveling somewhere, try giving
to these actions, or to the advantage you get from doing them, a mark.
From 0 to 10, from 0 to 100, it doesn't matter! The point is playing
making quantitative concepts out of qualitative ones, and starting
making better analysis on their basis. For example, if dedicating yourself
to jogging in the morning has for you a higher mark than going to gym,
you could simply start to decide to ... go jogging more often!
Quantity in most of cases helps you to better focus on the most
important things, and cleans your thoughts from the unnecessary stuff!
Try to make measurements where nobody else would do it. "Not
everything that can be counted really counts, and not everything that
counts can be really counted", said Albert Einstein.
This phrase not only confirms what I earlier said about the fact that
mathematics and calculations sometimes must simply be put aside
(luckily), but can help us to understand that, too much often, the most
commonly used measurement systems can deceive us, and can divert our
attention from the things that really matter.
An example I love doing about this is in the school report cards: their
obvious purpose should be giving the measurement of the performance
of a student, but we often forget that, on the other side, there could be a
teacher that simply has an awful teaching method.
And that's where we should start to "make measurements" where nobody
else would do it: letting the students evaluate the quality and the
goodness of their teacher's work could push everybody into doing better
his/her work, and consequently into producing better results for
everybody.
Making measurements, evaluating, focusing on the things that other
people tend to ignore, gives you that extra oomph that will produce a
significant advantage in any kind of situation!
Increase the quantity and improve the quality of your measurement
instruments. Imagine: it's a lazy evening and you decide to go watching
a movie to the cinema. Now, you have to decide which movie buying
the tickets for, but you're hesitating between that new action movie with
a lot of old celebrities and that new horror Japanese movie about a dead
woman who comes back from the grave. Now you could take your
smartphone, read the movie reviews from some famous website and
simply choose the movie with the highest rate. But of course you would
better estimate the quality of those movies after increasing the
quantity of your measurement instruments and, for example, reading
movie ratings from many different websites instead than from only one
of them.
Now there is a concept that can really come in handy: the mathematical
mean that, although is quite widely known, we'll explain in a few words,
just to make sure that everybody knows what are we talking about.
If you have multiple quantities, multiple measurements, multiple values
(ex. 3, 4 and 5 stars rating for a movie on three different websites), you
can sum those numbers (ex. 3 + 4 + 5 = 12) and then divide the result by
the number of values you considered (three ratings in this case, so 12 / 3
= 4).
This will give you the mean of those quantities, which is universally
considered as a very precious value since, as in the measurements
theory, as in the probability one, it's said to be very close to the "real"
value of something (if a real value can philosophically or scientifically
exist, of course).
But now, let's add something and let's talk about quality of measurement
instruments: how many times happened that a multi-award winning
movie just left you asleep in your chair?
