• Question: whats the best way to do big additions

    Asked by faux522fees to Sujit B, ruthmclauchlan, Ruth A, paulterrill, Nick L, kathrynhowells, Fiona B on 3 Feb 2025.
    • Photo: Ruth McLauchlan

      Ruth McLauchlan answered on 3 Feb 2025:

      Spreadsheets (EXCEL) are great for analysing lots of data and performing calculations but if you have lots of big numbers it can be better to write a computer programme to do that for. We do lots of coding in Python.

    • Photo: Paul Terrill

      Paul Terrill answered on 5 Mar 2025:

      How big is big? Whilst we use computers to do most of our maths it is defintely worth having the ability to do some ourselves by hand, or at least have a feeling ourselves of what the answer is. Computers themselves don’t (tend to) make mistakes but we can make mistakes using them, either in the numbers we enter, the buttons we push, or the computer programs we run so we need to have a rough idea of what we are expecting.

      I use the column method for summing numbers, even when trying to do the whole thing mentally, though can’t claim it to be the best way. Maths is good exercise for the brain.

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