This time though, she shows how to deal with an “excess” digit. Interestingly, it appears to follow the same principle of “carrying over” in traditional multiplication.
The “trick” looks undeniably elegant when dealing with smaller digits, but it quickly falls apart when multiplying 9 and 8, for instance.
That’s probably because the method was not originally designed to appear cool or impressive. As Caroline Delbert puts it in a Yahoo article:
“People working as builders or doing business often didn’t know how to read and write, let alone have something to write on at hand. If they could break problems into actual physical pieces they could arrange and count, that was easier, faster, and required less brute force memorization even in the short term.”
Nonetheless, the method appears to be a hit on TikTok. And it surely won’t hurt to learn something new.
“This is my favorite method. I’ve literally used this every time,” one user wrote in the comments.
Still, some found it confusing.
“What is this? I don’t understand it at all,” one noted.
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