> I got by in school with A's & B's because I was a pretty diligent student and could apply/recognize (on paper) some/most of the concepts. But I have no natural talent or intuition for it.

I'm good at doing math, but almost totally unable to explain how to do it. Intuition seems like it should be antithetical to math, but, as far as I can tell, it isn't really. Methods, and sometimes answers, just come naturally. The main time I need to visualize is when learning something new. For example, when first taught about derivatives, the analogous ideas of distance, speed, and acceleration helped keep the numbers from becoming meaningless to me.

For mental math, it often helps to change the problem to a bunch of easy steps. To do 18x31, which is ugly if not hard, the first step would be 20x31=620, then 2x31=62, then 620-62=600-42=560-2=558. Lots of steps to it, but all easy ones, so it ends up taking very little time.

> koala"has happily found some common ground with Dave"mom
>
> *I realize the question really is, how to you train your *mind* to stick the numbers. Doesn't seem you can apply the same mnemonic skills to numbers as you can to words...no rhymes or associations will work very well, and even trying to remember shapes won't work because numbers are all the same height, unlike letters. So is it that you have this ability to recall numbers, or you don't? Or is there another way to remember?

Out of extreme depths of boredom one day, I memorized pi to 120 places. (Don't laugh.) The surprising thing was that it wasn't difficult. Every substring reminded me of people's phone numbers and addresses, simple patterns, and other must-know numbers, like of Social Security cards and Driver's Licenses.

gab"BOAT's avg. location size = 5479 bytes"by