Six sevens are . . . you either know the answer, don’t care or your heart sinks into your boots. Generations of schoolchildren have learnt their times tables, often just by repeating the dratted things until they are etched into their brains. In this age of computers and calculators, do we need them any more? If we do, what is the best way to teach them or learn them? Can we even learn to love them?

Ernst Kummer, one of the great mathematicians of the late 1800s, was hopeless at arithmetic. He was giving an advanced maths lecture and in the middle of a complicated calculation he needed to know what six times seven was. “Um … six times seven is … six times seven . . .”

A student put up his hand: “41, Professor.” Kummer chalked 41 on the blackboard. “No, no, Professor!” shouted another. “It’s 44!” Kummer gave the students a quizzical look. “Come, come, gentlemen. It can’t be both. It must be either one or the other!”

Kummer should have learnt his times tables; it would have saved him being the butt of student pranks. When I was 7 my mum taught me my tables by springing questions on me. Out of the blue would come “Ian, What’s nine times seven?” And she didn’t stop asking such things until I could fire back the answer immediately and unerringly. A few months of this arithmetical assault course burnt the tables into my brain. If St Peter asks me what six sevens is at the Pearly Gates, I’ll be a shoo-in.

Times tables — more properly multiplication tables — have been around for thousands of years. They appear on 3,500-year-old Babylonian clay tablets. Many just list the multiples of a single number, but more than 80 list multiples of several numbers. Babylonian schoolchildren had to learn their times tables too, and I bet they complained just as vociferously as youngsters today. In AD493 Victorius of Aquitaine wrote down a table multiplying 98 numbers by every number from 2 to 50. Be grateful that your child doesn’t have to learn that….Continue reading