Northern Wisconsin advertiser. [volume] (Wabeno, Wis.) 1898-1925, 1901-07-04
LIGHTNING CALCULATIONS.
Remarkable Feats That Have Puzzled
Expert Mathematicians.


Expert Mathematicians.
Some skeptical persons who wit.
messed Inaudi's extraordinary per-
formances il mental arithmetic at the
! London llippodrome short time ago,
expressed an uneasy feeling that they
might probably have been duped after
all; that the wonderful sums in add.
ton, subtraction, division and extrac-
ton of root which were proposed to
him from the audience, and which he
seemed to perform with such ease and
expedition, to say nothing of his re-
peating without error the long rows
OF hgures written ON blackboard be-
/ hind his back. might nave been all
carefully arranged aud learned be,
forehand. Their skepticism, however,
was entirely groundless. Inaudi first
gave evidence of his curious aptitude
for mentally manipulating figures
when he was six years old. At the
age of seven he could multiply with
five figures correctly. And for
some years after this he relieved the
tedium of his lonely life as Pledmon-
tese shepherd boy by sedulously cul-
tivating this extraordinary faculty.
And he is by no means the only in
stance on record of boy of little or
no education being able to do sums
which might puzzle a senior wrang-
Ter, and whose inexplicable powers
have certainly afforded further puz-
zle to the professional psychologist.
A farm laborer from Derbyshire.
named Jedediah Buxton, who was ex-
amined before the Royal society in
1854, was possessed of a very similar
power. Although his grandfather was
vicar and his father schoolmaster of
the parish in which he was born, yet
Jedediah either from natural in
capacity or from preoccupation with
his arithmetical pursuits, never even
either could or would not so much as
learn to write, ana was content to
work as farm laborer to the end of
bis days. But at a very early age he
appears to have had an intuitive per-
ception of the relative proportions of
numbers, and to this subject he de.
voted the whole of his attention. His
method was so much his own that he
seems to have been quite unac
quainted with the common rules.
On one occasion, having been re.
CURED to multiply 456 by 37S, and hav-
ing done it as quickly as one of his
examiners could do it in the ordinary
xpo hn
audibly, in order that his method
might be discovered. 1t then appear.
ed, curiously enough, that he went to
work in very roundabout way. First
he multiplied the 456 by 5, which pro-
duced 1880; this he again multiplied
by 20, and found the product to be
45,6OO. OF course he might much more
readily have achieved this result by
simply adding two noughts to the null
tiplicand. This he evidently did not
know. However, he next went on to
multiply the number he had now ar
rived at by 8, which gave him the
sum of the multiplicand multiplied
by 800; and it then remained for him
, to multiply it by the remaining 7S.
This he effected by the awkward pro-
cess of multiplying by Is the $3.50
which was the product obtained by
his first multiplication of 456 by 5.
The product thus obtained he then
added to the 136,S00, which was the
sum q 456 multiplied by 800. This
produced III 900 as the sum of 456
multiplied by 375. 1t remained for
him, therefore, to multiply the origi-
nal number again by and add the
sum of it to III 900, and by this GER
tainly rather cumbrous process he
found the product of 456 multiplied by
37S to be 172,36S.
Jedediah had no more general
knowledge than any average peasant
boy of ten years of age, and showed
no memory for anything but figures.
He was sometimes asked when he re-
turned from church if he could repeat
the text or any part of the sermon,
but he could never remember a single
sentence. In one matter only except
ing his figures, did he ever show the
slightest interest, but his desire to
see the king and the royal family
was strong enough to induce him,
when forty-seven years of age, to
walk to London for that purpose. He
was entertained by the editor of The
Gentleman's Magazine at st. Johns
Gate and exhibited to the Royal So
ciety, the members of which he after
wards referred to as "the volk of
Siety court" During his stay in Lon
don he was taken to Drury Lane
theater to see Richard Ill.," but