AMAZED SAVANTS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 12, 15 January 1932, Page 12

AMAZED SAVANTS

CUBE ROOT FEAT LAWYER'S REMARKABLE SYSTEM INSPIRATION WHILE MILKING. Three hundred professors, teachers, and students, members of the Mathematics Club of Columbia University, applauded in astonishment when a lawyer showed them that he could extract the cube root of numbers up to fifteen digits in ; nety seconds without writing a single figure. The lawyer was Urbano L. Barrett, of Los Angeles. His system of computation, he said, is based “partly on memory, partly on concentration and partly on the application of certain properties of numbers, whatever that is.” He insisted that ho was “no mathematician” and declared that be had devised his system 27 years ago, when a boy, while milking a cow at his home in Texas. Because of calculating machines and mathematical tables it was of “no practical value,” he held. Wary of “It Can’t be Done.” “When I was a boy in school in Texas a salesman came around and tried to sell me a book of mathematical tables and short cuts,” he said. “1 asked him to show me the short-cut to extract the cube root. Ho told me, ‘lt can’t be done.’ I was 17 years old then. Ono day when I was milking the cow and puzzling about it, the idea came to me. I dropped the pail, ran into the house and made a note before I forgot it. It was 20 years later before I learned theie was anything remarkable about it. My only purpose in coming before you is to show you that, all the formulae haven’t yet been worked out and to tell you to beware of the man who tolls you ‘lt can’t be done.’ Also I get a lot more fun out of this than out of practicing law.” Professor W. D. Reave, of Teachers’ College, who presented Mr Barrett, then invited the audience to submit numbers for extraction. Several instructors and students had multiplied long numbers to get tho cubes, and were ready to read off tho products. The first number called out was 997,002,999. Mr Barrett stared at the table for nearly a minute. Then he asked, “Is that 999?” It was. But this was not hard enough for him. He asked for a longer number. Solves One With 15 Digits. A man who had been multiplying figures at a great rate read off the number 413,960,021,245,952. Mr Barrett stared at the table. He put his hands over his eyes and bent his head. He clasped his hands under his chin. He walked up and down. A minute and ahalf passed, and he looked up with a smile. “Is that 74,528?” The man who had submitted the number looked completely amazed and said faintly: “Well, that’s it.” Another number submitted was .000,259,584. After two minutes, Mr Barrett asserted that there was no such cube. He was right. It took him exactly a minute to decide that the cube root of 31,136,956.136 was 314.6. “I can take any number and get closer to the cube root than you can with a slide rule,” he declared. “But with calculatir machines, no one wants to trust a, man to do computing any more, anyway,” he said. Explaining how he obtained his results, he said that the number of digits in the root could be told by reference to the number of digits in the original and that the first and the final digits could be ascertained with ease by following a few simple rules. “The intermediate figures are the hardest,” he declared. He said that he had never commercialised his gift for mental computation, and exercised it only for his own amusement.