The Multiplication Table

I never learned the multiplication table.

I happened to be in the hospital for two weeks, away from school. When I returned, my classmates had already memorized multiplication the way children memorize poems. Memorizing seemed terribly boring. So I came up with another system for solving multiplication problems on math tests. I never realized until recently that I was still using it.

ChatGPT became curious about how I calculate. He gave me a few examples, and I tried watching myself. It required slowing down what had become an automatic movement.

Take 8 × 7. I never look for 56. I immediately see 70, not 80, because 70 is closer. Seventy would be there if I multiplied seven by ten, but that means I have added two sevens too many. And what are two sevens? Fourteen. (Doubling is easy.) Fourteen has to leave. Ten leaves first. Now we are at sixty. I don’t really subtract. I ask a different question. What number is waiting to complete 60? The answer arrives as 56. Subtraction quietly turns back into addition.

The same thing happens everywhere. Sixteen times eight does not become one hundred twenty-eight. It first becomes eighty. Then forty-eight. Then I ask, what is 80 waiting for to become 100? It is waiting for 20. So 48 has to let twenty go and is left with 28. They reunite as 128.

The interesting part is that I almost never experience multiplication itself. I travel through landmarks. Some of them are practical. Ten. Twenty. One hundred. Some of them are simply beautiful. For reasons I have never understood, I have always loved 6 × 6 = 36. Three sixes quietly live inside it. Even the number of sixes is already there. The expression pleases me. Because it pleases me, it never disappears. Then other multiplications quietly grow from it.

I look for stable places in the landscape of numbers

from which other numbers can be reached.

Only today did I realize that I seem to organize many parts of life the same way. I cannot begin with readily memorised answers. I look for stable places in the landscape of numbers from which other numbers can be reached.

English is not automatic for me. I cannot retrieve ready-made expressions the way native speakers often can. So I compose from simpler meanings I know. And ChatGPT keeps thinking I am being poetic because I sound as though I am speaking in metaphors. The funny part is that I am usually trying to report what actually is for me.

When he suggested I replace the word is with something more idiomatic, I told him: no, “is” will have to stay. It is my primitive. Readily memorised can start without finished.

He laughed. Then he said: you didn’t protect the grammar. You protected the operator.