The Butte inter mountain. [volume] (Butte, Mont.) 1901-1912, 1901-06-07
FIGHTING CALCULATIONS.
Remarkable Feats That Puzzled the
Mathematicians.

1SemaTAaD1e EeatS mat Puzzled the 1
Mathematician.
Some skeptica1 persons who witnessed
Inaudfs extraordinary performances in
mental arithmetic at the London Hip
podrome short time ago expressed an
uneasy feeling that they might probably
have been duped after all; that the Won
derful sums in addition. subtraction, di-
vision and extraction 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
repeating without error the long rows Of
figures written on a blackboard behind
his back, might have been a carefully
arranged and learned beforehand Their
however, was entirely
groundless. maud first gave evidence
of his curious aptitude for mentally
manipulating figures when h ewas
years old. At the age of he could null
tiply with five figures correctly. And for
some years after this he relieved the
tedium of his lonely life as a Pied
monies shepherd boy by sedulously
this extraordinary faculty.
And he is by no means the only instance
OF record of boy of little or no edu-
ca ton being able to do sums which
might puzzle a senior wrangler, and
whose inexplicable powers have certain
ly afforded a further puzzle to the pro-
fessional psychologist.
A farm laborer from Derbyshire
named Jedediah Buxton, who was ex-
1854. was possess hrd emf emf shr en- IN
amined before the Royal society in 1854,
nOSSaSSaH of CT
Although his grandfather was vicar and
his father schoolmaster of the parish
in which he was born. yet Jedediah
either from natural incapacity or from
preoccupation with his arithmetical
pursuits, never even acquired the rudi-
in!ents of learning; either could or
would not so much as learn to write,
ana was contented to work as farm
,laborer to the end of his days. But at
very early age he appears to have had
all 1ntultlVe PERCEPTION of the relative
proportions of numbers; and to this SUBJ
Ject ne devoted the whole of his atten-
ton. His method was SO much his own
that ne seems to have had TAO TEA E
that he seems to have been quite I'M
acquainted with the common rules, On
enc occasion, having been required to
multiply 456 by 1878, and having done
1t as quickly as one of his examiners
could do it in the ordinary way, he was
asked to work the sum audibly in order
that his method might be discovered. It
then appeared, curiously enough, that
he went to work in a very roundabout
way. First he multiplied the 456 by s.,
which produced $3.50; this he again
multiplied by 20, and found the product
to be 45,6000. OF course he might much
more readily have achieved this result
by simply adding two noughts to the
multiplicand. This he evidently did not
know. However. he next went on to
multiply the number he had now arrived
at by 3, which gave him the sum of the
multiplicant and multiplied by 300; and
it then remained for him to multiply it
by the remaining Is. This he effected by
the awkward process of multiplying by
Is the $3.50 which was the product OBJ
tanned by his first multiplication of 456
by 5. The product thus obtained he
then added to the 136.S0O. which was the
sum of 456 multiplied by 300. This pro-
duced $4,000 as the sum of 456 multi
piled by 375. 1t remained for him,
therefore, to multiply the original num-
bers again by and add the sum of it
to 171,O00, and by this certainly rather
cumbrous process he found the product
of 456 multiplied by s7S to be 1885,
Jedehiah had no more general knowl-
edge than any average peasant boy of 10
years of age, and shaved no memory for
anything but figures. He was some
times asked when he returned from
church if he could repeat the tet of any
part of the sermon, but he could never
remember single sentence. In one
matter only, excepting 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 AZ years of age, to walk to London
for that purpose. He was entertained
by the editor of the Gentlemen's Maya
zine at st. Johns Gate and exhibited to
the royal society," the members Of which