Kind: captions
Language: en
so I was on a show called genius Junior
when I was 12 years old 121 plus 13
squared times 2 minus 44 equals
536. correct on that show I did a bunch
of computations in a round called the
number cruncher I'm a form of honey dafu
I'm 17 and some people call me the human
calculator I have my journey in math
with something called Abacus which is an
ancient computation method when I was
five or six years old it's just a
different way of thinking about
computation adding subtracting all the
operations
on this Abacus each column represents a
different place value
and these beads are moved when counting
or to perform mathematical operations I
don't use my physical Abacus as often as
I used to just because I mostly do it in
my head nowadays the beauty of it was
being able to push myself farther and
farther challenge my brain but also be
able to see these patterns and that just
snowballed into doing math competitions
learning as much as I could about it to
put uporva's mental math skills to the
test we've come up with a problem that's
fit for Nova and asked a poorva to share
her secret to solving it a rocket is
traveling at a consistent velocity of 4
300 kilometers per hour how many hours
will it take to reach a planet
2.35 million kilometers away
it's the same way you think about it in
traditional division but you start with
this number and you estimate how many
groups of this can go into it first and
so I would go with five you just keep
subtracting it but it happens in your
head for and then presumably
six
I can't keep up with that so what about
multiplication what is 34 times 76
34 times 76 is 2 5 8 4. wow
so the way I did it is kind of similar
to how you do it in school is I do the
two digit times this one digit first and
in my head I have it as 238 and then I
do three four times six and then that's
204 and then I sort of use the Abacus in
my head and that gives me two five eight
four but a nice trade secret as you're
calculating it you can start saying the
answer because you know it starts with
the two and then as you're adding you're
like okay the next one is five the next
one is eight I think you can't do any of
stem without the M how do you interpret
data how do you interpret experiments
and how do you interpret the world being
good at math just means having
confidence going into a problem I'm
technically homeschooled but I take
classes at my local University San Jose
State and also online for John with
Johns Hopkins University and then I also
do like random online AP courses where
I'm going to go to school is to be
determined because I'm a senior doing
College applications right now but
hopefully somewhere that I fit in and
can find a really nice math department