Quick, what’s 90,157 divided by 7?
Before you could start scribbling out your long division on a napkin, or, more likely, grabbing your calculator and punching away, Scott Flansburg rattles off the answer.
Dividing to the 30th decimal point? No problem. Cubing numbers or finding the root of a cubed number? A snap. Multiplying two six-digit numbers? It’s all a breeze for Flansburg, who, quite understandably, calls himself “The Human Calculator.”
Like a barker at a carnival side show, Flansburg captures an audience of 5th graders or school teachers with his freakish skills. He will race any adding machine or computer around at solving a mathematical query–and he always comes out on top.
And after the gasps and applause that greet his work, he provides a real shock: He swears that anyone can do it.
“I have yet to meet someone who can’t learn what I teach them,” said Flansburg, in Chicago recently to visit schools and to promote his updated program and a new infomercial. “I can tell you what day you were born if you tell me the date, and that may impress you, but it’s just a simple formula that I can do instantaneously. I teach it to kids, although it takes them a couple of minutes to get it.”
The notion that his skill adding up a column of numbers mentally would grow from the realm of bar bet to an infomercial and a multimillion-dollar business never occurred to Flansburg until five years ago.
At 18, the day after graduating high school in Herkemer, N.Y., Flansburg entered the Air Force and spent the next four years in Japan as a computer programmer. His grades in school had been average, except for math. His scores, in those classes, were perfect.
“Ever since I was a little kid, when I would learn math, instead of just going over it and over it again, I would find a quicker way to do it,” Flansburg said. “By the time I was in 5th grade I was pretty much doing any type of arithmetic in my head faster than you could on a calculator.”
After Japan, Flansburg was stationed in Alabama, where he first realized that he could teach his math skills to others. A friend who knew Flansburg was a math whiz, asked him to help his son, who had already failed kindergarten and the 1st grade.
“I’ll never forget it, his name was Travis, and he was terrible in math,” Flansburg said. “His dad asked me if I could sit down with Travis and show him a little bit of what I did.
“The next week his teacher called and asked me if I was the one who had shown him the math tricks. I thought she was going to be angry, but she said, `I don’t know what the heck you showed him, but this kid is spitting out numbers left and right and is doing math ahead of the rest of the class.’ “
Flansburg visited and talked to the teacher’s class, the rest of the school, the rest of the district, and then to other districts around the state. He left the Air Force and moved to Los Angeles determined to become a “math star.”
Fame was slow in coming, and Flansburg said he was practically homeless for months. Eventually he made his way to Phoenix, and began returning to schools to hold free talks.
“I have never taken money from a school, not even when I was broke, because it’s a moral issue for me,” said Flansburg, who visits up to 500,000 students each year. “I feel the infomercial funds my life and lifestyle. But the real payoff for me is when I sit in a room full of kids and watch their faces light up.”
Flansburg worked nights to pay the rent while visiting schools and holding adult seminars throughout Arizona, until he came up with the idea to create a workbook and video for people who wanted more information. Once the orders began pouring in, Flansburg made an infomercial, and soon his math skills were being seen around the world.
From the time he helped his first child, Flansburg realized that his lifelong mission was to make everyone as aware of what he calls innumeracy, the inability to do simple math, as they are of illiteracy.
“It has become socially acceptable to be stupid in mathematics, and you can admit it on national TV and no one is going to think any less of you,” Flansburg said. “But if you were illiterate, you wouldn’t tell me because it’s socially embarrassing.”
His adult audiences tend to scoff when he tells them that they are capable of becoming human calculators.
“In the first 15 minutes I blow them away when I race the calculator, and then I tell them I’m going to show them how to do it,” Flansburg said. “They don’t believe me. Then I show them how to add, and all of a sudden everyone’s body language changes and they realize that it’s pretty easy.
“Then I tell them I’m going to show them how to multiply and everyone says they can’t do it. I say wait, a minute ago you said you couldn’t add three-digit numbers in your head and now you can, so before you say you can’t do it, before you put that limit on yourself, just say, `Maybe I can do this.’ “
While Flansburg believes everyone can learn his skills, he does admit that he is an extreme case.
“Hit any three-digit number,” Flansburg said, instructing a reporter who was holding a calculator. “No wait, that ends in 5, that’s too easy. OK, 836. Now hit plus 836 again and hit equals and you get 1672.
“Now hit equals as fast as you can and you get 2,508 then 3,344, next is 5,016, 6,678 . . .”
To bring his math lessons to more children, Flansburg is creating a comic book and a series of skill books, and is planning a cartoon that he hopes will air in the fall.
“There is such an emphasis on sports in this country, while there are so few role models for education,” Flansburg said. “If I can show kids a cool way to learn, then they might get excited about themselves and what they can do.”
And once children and adults learn the secrets to simple math, Flansburg said, they will know immediately that the answer to 90,157 divided by 7, is, of course, 12,879.57142.
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For more information about Scott Flansburg`s program or his school visits, call 800-376-MATH.
