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11/05/2009 #ERROR |
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Eiji
Kimura, Mental Soroban Champion
National soroban championships are an annual tradition. For the past four years, the hands-down winner has been Eiji Kimura, 21, a senior in business administration at Kyoto Industrial University. His love affair with the abacus began at age eight, when he attended his first juku. Two years later he had reached a fourth-degree level (on a scale of ten), and he won his first national championship at age sixteen. Kimura practices with ferocious intensity for two uninterrupted hours every day and can perform feats that flabbergast his rivals and even his teacher. He can add fifteen twelve-digit numbers in twenty seconds and in less than four minutes can perform thirty multiplications, each a twelve-digit number times a six-digit one. Thirty comparable long-division problems take him three minutes. All this takes place faster than human fingers can flick the beads of an abacus, because Kimura has attained such a state of mathematical satori that he now performs his calculations in his head by visualizing the sequences used on a soroban. Here is how he mentally multiplies 256,436 by 1,297,584: "First divide both figures in two parts–256,436 as 256 and 436, and 1,297,584 as 1,297 and 584. Then multiply 436 by 584 and write down the last three numbers. Next multiply 436 by 1,297 and 256 by 584, add them up, and write down the last three numbers. Then multiply 256 by 1,297 and write down the first seven numbers. Now put them in order–the seven numbers first, followed by the three numbers from the second stage of calculation, and finally the three numbers from the first multiplication." In other words, he immediately breaks multiplication into (256,000 + 436) x (1,297,000 + 584). The whole operation takes him eight seconds. Says he: "I have an abacus in my head, although the image isn't a clear one. When I see a number, I instantly draw mental images of beadlike things." Division is Kimura's favorite subject, although he
concedes that such formidable problems as 3,457,046,665,864 divided by 9,853,796
give him the faintest of headaches: "Sometimes I cannot see the beads
clearly in my head. That's when I have trouble. I sometimes see numbers falling
apart." Kimura's mentor-coach Masaharu Yamamoto likens his pupil's state of
intense concentration in mental calculation to that of Zen meditation–not an
ecstatic state but a state of detachment or letting go.
Kimura says: "It's not that I don't hear anything. I hear people speaking,
but only a few words stick to my memory. Things just don't disturb me." Martin Gardner |