soroban

A soroban is a Japanese abacus that lets skilled users make lightning-quick calculations of large groups of numbers with speeds that rival an electronic calculator.

Stars and Stripes 2009

Yet it does explain an astonishing phenomenon: that soroban experts are able to multitask in the most incredible way.

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Inevitably, this is a drop from the 1970s, before the age of the electronic calculator, when, at its peak, 3.2 million pupils sat at the national soroban proficiency exam in a year.

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A single-digit number is marked on the soroban using one column.

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Almost three hundred children, between ages 5 and 12, sat at desks in a conference hall, with an array of special soroban accessories, like sleek abacus bags.

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Miyamoto simplifies this as “soroban uses the right brain, normal math uses the left brain.”

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Miyamoto met his wife, a former national soroban champion, when they frequented the same abacus club as youngsters.

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The Chinese suan-pan has seven, and the Japanese soroban is the most compact of all, with five.

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The soroban relies on networks associated with visuospatial information.

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In a soroban, there are exactly ten positions of beads per column, representing the numbers from 0 to 9, as shown on the next page.

HERE’S LOOKING AT EUCLID Alex Bellos 2010