Word: digitals
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Last week sari-clad Shakuntala, now 20, gave a demonstration in Washington before a party of reporters and mathematics professors. She had become a master of the arm-long number. Without error or hesitation she extracted fourth, fifth and sixth roots of numbers up to ten digits. (Her record to date: extracting the 20th root of a 42 -digit number and multiplying figures that yielded a 39-digit result.) Without hesitation, she worked out "magic squares" (horizontal, vertical and diagonal sums are identical), starting with random numbers suggested by the audience...
Like most number prodigies, Shakuntala does not know how she does it. She thinks about the problem and the numbers come - in three or four seconds. Often she gives the answer as soon as her questioner has written down the last digit. In the case of the root problems, the answer must be a whole number. Her mysterious talent does not yield uneven answers. She has studied logarithms, but they confused her and she does not use them...
...digit, instead of ten digit, system is employed by computing machines in order to overcome the limitations of electric tubes, which can handle the two digit system much more easily...
While officers from Army Ordnance, which owns ORDVAC, watched with admiration, the Illinois professors who built the machine fed problem after problem into its twinkling innards. ORDVAC added numbers at the rate of 10,000 per second. It finished twelve-digit problems in multiplication (e.g., 428,945,437,246 times 342,873,937,895) in one thousandth of a second. It did complex problems that required it to "remember" elaborate sets of instructions. It "generated" 352 random numbers and manipulated them in the subtle ways that delight mathematicians. One endurance test, involving floods of figures, took twelve hours. Every...
Questionnaires were sent to every fifth upperclassman. The starting number was chosen by opening a book at random, using the last digit of the page number to determine the polling...