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The man came over. The waiters brought me
a paper and pencil. The man asked a waiter to call out some numbers to
add. He beat me hollow, because while I was writing the numbers down, he
was already adding them as he went along. "Multiplicação!"
he said. Somebody wrote down a problem. He beat me again, but not by
much, because I'm pretty good at products. The man, then, made a
mistake: he proposed we go on to division. What he didn't realize was,
the harder the problem, the better chance I had. We did a long division
problem. It was a tie.
"Raios cubicos!"
he says with a vengeance. Cube roots! He writes down a number: 1729.03.
He starts working on it, mumbling and grumbling; Meanwhile I'm just
sitting there. I write down 12 on the paper. After a little while, I've
got 12.002. The man with the abacus wipes the sweat off his forehead:
"Twelve!" he says. "Oh, no!" I say. "More
digits!" I add on two more digits. He finally lifts his head to
say, "12.01!" The waiter are all excited and happy. They tell
the man, "Look! He does it only by thinking, and you need an
abacus! He's got more digits!"
The number was 1729.03. I
happened to know that a cubic foot contains 1728 cubic inches, so the
answer is a tiny bit more than 12. The excess, 1.03 is only one part in
nearly 2000, and I had learned in calculus that for small fractions, the
cube root's excess is one-third of the number's excess. So all I had to
do is find the fraction 1/1728, and multiply by 4 (divide by 3 and
multiply by 12). I was lucky that he chose 1729.03." (To be
continued; write at The Tribune or adityarishi99@yahoo.co.in)
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