Finger Multiplication



Hold your hands up in front of you, palms forward .

Your thumbs are each a "6",
Your pointer fingers are each a "7"
Middle fingers are each an "8"
Ring fingers are each a "9"
Pinky fingers are each a "10"


Okay - now hands are in front of you, palms forward, fingers upward.

Let's multiply 7X8:

Put the pointer finger of left hand (7) touching the middle finger of right hand (8).

Now count the two fingers that are touching plus one finger below that on the left and two fingers below that on the right.

Countiing the two touching fingers and the ones below them you have five "lower" fingers.

On the top, above the touching fingers, you have 3 on the left and 2 on the right.

So - to multiply 7X8 you have your 7 finger and your 8 finger touching and then you add up all the lower fingers (counting the touching ones) and that is 5. (That is how many "tens" the answer will have.)

Then you multiply the top ones and that is 2X3 is 6.

To multiply 7X7 you touch your 7 fingers together and you get:
4 under and 3x3 on top - 49

yep
cool
I fooled with trying to write equations for how it works - never manged to do it.
if you put the two thumbs together - that is 6X6....
but you only have two lower fingers - so that's only 20.
only a "2" I mean.
but when you mulitply the top fingers it is 4X4 which is 16.
gmta
so you add the 16 to the 20 that you get from the 2 thumbs.
that makes 36
so - the lower fingers are really "tens"
and the upper fingers are "ones"

Posted: Wed - January 21, 2004 at 12:31 AM      


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