There is so much more to multiplication than cramming multiplication tables.

Love it or hate it, multiplication is one of the essential aspects of Maths. Who can forget the long, tedious hours spent in learning or perhaps cramming the multiplication tables? I know there were many smart bees amongst us did this in a jiffy, but poor souls like us were tortured. Today, we present to you some of the amazing multiplication facts to bedazzled you and perhaps make you look at multiplication with new-found respect.

1. The oldest multiplication tables were used about 4000 years ago by Babylonians.
2. The word “Multiply” is made up of two words from Latin, “Multus” which translates to “multi” and “Plex” which translates to “folding”.
3. If we have a zero in any multiplication problem, no matter what, the answer would always be zero.
4. Multiplication is also repeated addition. This means, in a way; we always add a number repeatedly.
5. Multiplication is one of the four elementary operations in athematic alongside addition, subtraction, and division.
6. When we inverse multiplication, it becomes division.
7. The numbers which are to multiplied are called the multiplier and other one multiplicand. They are sometimes also known as factors. The answer to the multiplication problem is known as a product.
8. The multiplication tables are named after the famous Greek Mathematician and scholar Pythagoras as “Tables of Pythagoras”.
9. Famous German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz invented the path-breaking calculating machine that could not only perform subtraction and addition, but also multiplication, division, and even extracting square root!
10. In medieval Europe, scholars used Roman numbers in the calculation, which posed a great deal of difficulty in division and multiplication. It was in 1200 AD with the introduction of Arabic numerals, the process of division and multiplication was simplified.
11. Fun fact: If you multiply 1089 by 9, the answer would be the exact opposite 9801!
12. Shakuntala Devi, the Mathematic Wiz from India shook the world by multiplying 13 digits number in mere 28 seconds. This feat made it to the Guinness Book of World Record in the year 1980.
13. At the tender age of 7, Samarth Bhagyesh Patel from India has a record of solving ten random problems of multiplication in just one minute and 30.60 seconds. Phew!

So, were we able to hold your interest? Do you like your multiplication tables a little better?