^ net, a ti tuda hodil?
ya hodil v mat klas drugoi shkoly
ya ne popal posle 3 rounda
ya ne osobo v teme, esli chestno, poetomy ne mogu kommentirovat’
Why was ten afriad of seven?
Because 10 has gender identity issues.
7 is already full from 9 so can’t eat no more.
Because seven ate nine and ten is next
You have a six sense of humor. 
Must be something I eight four breakfast.
Two shea.
You one
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=1406
^Secrets of Mental Math by The Teaching Company
I only watched the first vid and it seemed pretty legit
I always get looked at for those types of normal every day questions because of my apparent prowess. I am actually good at mental math, approximations, percents, etc. But that’s about it nowadays. The people I work with think I’m a whiz kid because I pointed out an error on an Excel sheet. Word to the wise, DON’T do that, I thought I was going to get fired. Apparently suits don’t like getting errors pointed out from lowly underlings. Whoda thunk
But more on the OP - I was good growing up. We always had these math tables to do at school with like 100 questions on them, and we were timed to see how fast we could complete them. I’m one of the most competitive people you’ll meet, so you best believe I got that ish done the fastest almost every time, with the highest probability of getting 100%. I think that’s what started my math ability.
But I got only a 710 on the math portion of the SAT, and I nearly flipped out; I thought I was a math GENIUS. But I never took prep classes so maybe that was it. We also had graphing calculators that we had to use (TI-82 Plus I think?), so I had a heavy reliance upon that.
Then I got to college, and a lot of the stuff we had to calculate without usage of any calculators (IRR, quant stuff etc). But then I stumbled across my BA II+ in like my senior year or whatever, now I’m dumb again.
You can calculate IRR without a calculator? As far as I know, even the calculators do a progressive approximation.
I thought the above as well
Sometimes they do teach to calculate IRR without calc through linear interpolation or solving the equiation (if possible). But the result is imprecise and doing this is only for the sake of understanding.
It was trial and error. HUGE HUGE HUGE PITA. They didn’t make us get a very close answer, just like the nearest tenth, or something like that.
Approximate a number, get the wrong answer, pick a better number, get the wrong (but closer) answer, etc etc until you got to however close we had to bring the answer to make it “correct.” And Drago, that’s exactly why they took the calculators away. They wanted us to learn the “theory” behind the numbers. So we didn’t necessarily have to be so reliant on calculators, or when we had a user input error in a calculator, we would be able to pick up on it easier, I guess.
Yep. We did it too
Want to bump this after a year-long hiatus.
So there’s somebody in the GD forum who is majoring in Accounting, and wants to take advanced math and statistics, and was looking for some advice. Magician told them to focus on pure math, and I told them just to worry about accounting. (This isn’t surprising–I’m a CPA and Magician has a Master’s in Math.)
So who here actually uses math in their job? Not talking about adding 2 + 2, but who actually breaks out their TI-83 and uses upper-level math classes?
From talking to some petroleum/mechanical engineers, almost all of them say that they had to take 18+ hours of math in college, but none of them ever use it in real life. At best, some canned software does the math for them, and they just have to interpret the results–no calculations necessary.
Interpreting the reasonability of results still requires an understanding of the math behind the calculation. Otherwise any idiot off the street could be an engineer.
I don’t recall any actual Calc in the Quant section… Lol