DENVER - If anyone knows the value of a number, it has to be Scott Flansburg, a man known officially as "The Human Calculator."
"I had a weird moment in third grade where I got picked to go to the board and I did something backwards and I ended up doing it faster than the teacher," Flansburg said.
Since childhood, Flansburg says he devised his own method of calculation where he looks at the number system as based on the number 9 instead of 10.
"My goal is to reach every 9-year-old kid on the plant Earth to teach them that every number goes back to nine," Flansburg said.
He is in Denver to speak at an event called "Mathx" hosted at North High School in Denver. The series of short talks is put on by AT&T, DirectTV, and Teach for America.
"I like to think about this particular one as making math fun," Jeni Bell, AT&T Vice President and General Manager of the Rocky Mountain Region, said. "Especially for our future workforce, math is going to be important for the future of our economy."
Flansburg says he wants to inspire students and teachers to embrace numbers like a second language.
"Show people who this language comes alive. The numbers have patterns," Flansburg said. "It's weird. It's become socially accepted to be bad at math."
But, Bell says these talks are aimed at changing the norms, especially when it comes to focusing on science, technology, engineering, and math or STEM.
"S, T, and E aren't that meaningful with the M," Bell said. "So, we're really focused on math."
"The Human Calculator" earned that moniker after he set a Guinness World Record in mental calculation. He went up against an accountant with a calculator and counted by multiples of 38 for 15 seconds and beat the accountant.
"The Human Calculator is extremely impressive," Bell said.
In addition to the Mathx talk, Flansburg is also promoting the World Education Games which is an international education competition.
"We're trying to get people to talk about math," Flansburg said. "A lot of people just sort of avoid it. We've got calculators in our pockets, so we just think it's really easy to avoid numbers."
(© 2015 KUSA)
