Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Would these be good for a strong math student, but not one who is into competitions?
Are they fun or rote?
As other posters have said, it depends.
But I take a bit of an issue with your question. First off, "rote" is typically used as a derogatory term by those wanting to push their snakeoil "critical thinking" humbug. But let's apply the principle of charity here and assume by "rote" you mean that something is being repeated in order to learn it by heart.
Yes, actually, successful competitors end up memorizing things, including but not limited to:
- all squares until at least 27^2
- all cubes until at least 11^3
- all powers of two until at least 2^16
- Pascal's triangle until at least 6 choose k
- triangular numbers until at least 55
- all primitive Pythagorean triples until their sum exceeds 90
- Heronian triangles with small areas
- fraction to decimal conversion for powers of 2, for 3, 7, 9, and 11 (at least).
So if you think that, for instance, being asked to answer questions like "what's the hundredth digit after the period of 13/9" or "compute 32*38 in your head" is rote and you should use a calculator then Mathcounts is not for you.
A quick recall of math facts and a high level of fluency in mental arithmetic is however a characteristic of most famous mathematicians from Gauss to von Neumann.
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