But knowing ANY answer to ANY question is useful. There are lots of small multiplication problems in day-to-day life, and there is no doubt that knowing the answer to these is useful. I am going to claim that there are three basic reasons:ġ) To directly know the answer to common multiplication questions.ġ) This reason is important. Let’s start with a basic question: exactly why do we use times tables at all? (This is the kind of question my work on has me asking a lot!) To find it being given new emphasis nearly 40 years later struck me as so odd that I thought I should investigate it a little more mathematically. Since that madness ended with decimalization the year after I was born, by the late 1970s when I had to learn my 12 times table, it already seemed to be an anachronistic waste of time. Now, I always believed that the reason why I learned my 12 times table was because of the money system that the UK used to have-12 pennies in a shilling. My government (I’m in the UK) recently said that children here should learn up to their 12 times table by the age of 9.
