WIZARD OF FIGURES

Hokitika Guardian, 16 June 1928, Page 2

WIZARD OF FIGURES

Samuel Isaac Krieger, the “king of logarithms,” has arrived in New York and has demonstrated that man may still hold up his head in this age of machines. Krieger, who has just reached the.shores of America from Germany, and was visiting a cousin in Brooklyn, showed that lie is faster doing mathematics’with a stub of pencil than are those patent calculating machines. “ Multiply 3.141 Gby 3633,” he was told while another young man started' to do it on the machine. Krieger’s pencil executed a few quick manoeuvres. In five seconds he had the answer on his pad: 11,404,008. presently the machine confirmed the correctness of this lightning calculation.

“How old are you?” he asked a newspaper man. “Thirty-three,” Krieger’s pencil slashed through the air and in a few seconds he read from the pad: “You have lived 1.010,038,000 seconds. “Square this number,” said a voice, “ 18,440,744,073,709,551,010.” The pencil flew across the pad. Presto! In the wink of any eye lie bad written: Result, 340,282,366,920,935,403,374.007,431,768,211,456.

A faint cry arose from the youth operating the calculating machine. He had run off the keyboard.

Krieger explained that over in Germany be was not a particularly bright scholar. However, he became interested iu mathematical work and how to make short cuts. After four weeks’ study he evolved a formula, which, he said, is so simple that “ a ten-year-old child could use it.”

He has not a clear idea just what he will do with the formula. In Germany they told him ft could be embodied in a machine which would accomplish all the mathematical operations that his agile brain does. Krieger hopes so.