How to Do Algebra in Your Head
There is a free online book called Inner Algebra provides ways and tricks to solve algebra in your head. This is extremely useful for student (and people who want to impress people). Methods include visualization, chunking, windowing , correspondence. Most of the techniques involve practice your mind to think on steps visually:
… There are a few key abilities that form a foundation for doing math intuitively. The first is visualization. It is similar to using your imagination. If you have always been a ‘visual’ person, you will find some things easier. The first part of this chapter helps you develop this ability. If you already feel skilled in this area, this section can help you strengthen it in the specific ways that help you use it for math. Some people are naturally quite good at visualizing. If you feel that you don’t really need training in this area, you can skip the first section. Just make sure you can do the exercises at the end of the chapter….
Inner Algebra – How To Do Algebra In Your Head – [Aaron Maxwell]
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Comments
David says on January 19th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
This book is very suspicious — it seems to have been written by an amateur. The techniques he advocates are unreliable.
Consider this:
http://hilomath.com/inneralgebra/html/node30.html
This is patently incorrect. By taking the square root and neglect to add a +/-, he’s discarding one of the answers.
(x-2)^2 = 4 has two answers: x=0 and x=4; His method only gives x=0.
Colby Lemon says on January 26th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
Actually, you missed the footnote on that page (footnote 5.1), where he admits that he’s ignoring the second root (saying multiple roots are treated later).
Mike says on March 4th, 2006 at 9:41 am
I agree with David this is unreliable and written by an amateur!
oleg says on April 1st, 2006 at 7:49 am
it may be true that its written by an amature and it would be wrong to represent it otherwise – i think this novell approach is very valuable and learning to approach math in various ways is extremely useful and important, if you read stories of savants – you will learn that they do math in their mind “visually” the visualize very clear images often very complex and are able to do computations that would be very complex even for those proficient in math – so the more we can train our mind the better. even if methods suggested are incomplete
Gonash says on September 8th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
i think bdgbdgbadkgkafga, tht is the formula for pie. saghirgafdg =D