<p>My favorite method is using (a±b)^2=a^2±2b+b^2, so stuff like 119^2 becomes easy; its (120-1)^2=120^2-2*120+1. Fun trick, if you’ve never seen it before; most have, but I figured it out for myself! one of the relatively few math team tricks I did.</p>
<p>sran, i knew that trick too… <em>shake hands</em></p>
<p>I’m new to CC, and I’ve noticed that there are a lot of these ‘chance threads’ where an applicant puts up his/her resume and asks (presumably other students or parents) to assess his/her chances of admissions. I don’t understand the purpose of these threads, because it seems to me that nobody can give you any accurate measure of your chances if you’re reasonably well-qualified. It’s easy to give an assessment of one’s chances when he/she is obviously underqualified, like if he/she has a GPA of i (the square root of -1) and has more criminal convictions than AP classes taken, but for pretty much everyone who posts on these threads, there is no way to assess their chances.</p>
<p>If you’ve started a chance thread and actually found replies to be helpful to your application, please let me know, because there might be benefits that I don’t realize. This isn’t meant to sound sarcastic … I really am curious :)</p>
<p>sran, i knew that trick too… <em>shake hands</em></p>
<p>take enough math and you will be doing 10 algebraic manipulations like this in as many seconds and not even think of them as tricks :-)</p>
<p>i do that trick too but not algebraically, like say to myself “ok 119<em>119, we have 120 120’s, minus 120 is 120 119’s, minus 119 to get 119 119’s.” it works better because when doing say 22</em>22, you can do 400+40+44 easily.</p>
<p>Oh, we can all do the manipulations just fine and at that speed…its noticing the utility of that particular manipulation in the realm of arithmetic that makes me call it a “trick”.</p>
<p>yeah, eventually things like that won’t seem any different from adding 1.
By the way, you can do a floating point operation a second? Impressive</p>
<p>floating point operation like 1.0 x 2.5 ?</p>
<p>OK, q on manipulation…do you mean symbolic or numeric?</p>
<p>eh, whatever.</p>
<p>GP, tooling is life, must not punt…</p>