Jan Koum Quotes

Math? Forget about it. If I add four plus eight plus six, I have to count on my fingers. I guess I'm hooked up differently.

I'm probably one of the worst people with numbers you've ever met. My brothers always kid that they think I'm counting cards in Vegas, but I'm just trying to add things up.

I can do lightning mathematics quicker than somebody can do them on a calculator.

I was rather foolish in saying that I did not like arithmetic and to learn figures when I did - I was not thinking quite what I was about. The sums can be done better, if I tried, than they are.

When I was little, I carried a book of times tables around everywhere and always tried to get the best score. I like the fact that you don't need any tools, only your head. I also enjoy rules and, with maths, you are either right or wrong.

I recall being fascinated by numbers even at age three and viewed their manipulation as a kind of game.

We're all fascinated by the numbers, as we were about the 100 points.

In the old days when people invented a new function they had something useful in mind.

I knew I never wanted to become an archaeologist. But at school I became intrigued by what people were doing on an everyday basis in the past.

I was born in 1954. My parents were brought up in the war years, and life was hard.

You know, I'm not terribly fast at my times tables, because that's not what I think mathematics is about.

I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises.

Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza

The Fidasians are so expert in keeping their accounts, that they easily reckon as exact, and as quick by memory, as we can do with pen and ink

Thomas Fuller, known as the Virginia Calculator, was stolen from his native Africa at the age of fourteen and sold to a planter. When he was about seventy years old, 'two gentlemen, natives of Pennsylvania, viz., William Hartshorne and Samuel Coates, men of probity and respectable characters, having heard, in traveling through the neighborhood in which the slave lived, of his extraordinary powers in arithmetic, sent for him and had their curiosity sufficiently gratified by the answers which he gave to the following questions: First, Upon being asked how many seconds there were in a year and a half, he answered in about two minutes, 47,304,000. Second: On being asked how many seconds a man has lived who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old, he answered in a minute and a half 2,210,500,800. One of the gentlemen who employed himself with his pen in making these calculations told him he was wrong, and the sum was not so great as he had said—upon which the old man hastily replied: stop, master, you forget the leap year. On adding the amount of the seconds of the leap years the amount of the whole in both their sums agreed exactly.

The field of battle at Buena Vista is 6½ miles from Saltillo. Two Indiana volunteers ran away from the field of battle at the same time; one ran half a mile per hour faster than the other, and reached Saltillo 5 minutes and 54 6/11 seconds sooner than the other. Required their respective rates of travel. At the Women's Rights Convention, held at Syracuse, New York, composed of 150 delegates, the old maids, childless-wives, and bedlamites were to each other as the number 5, 7, and 3. How many were there of each class?

Seeing there is nothing that is so troublesome to mathematical practice, nor that doth more molest and hinder calculators, than the multiplications, divisions, square and cubical extractions of great numbers.... I began therefore to consider in my mind by what certain and ready art I might remove those hindrances.

I really love numbers.

My sister taught me addition and subtraction and multiplication and division, so by the time I got to school, I knew it all, and when we'd do the times tables, I was just focused on doing it faster than anybody else. I already had the information, so it just got me to focus on excellence.

Knowing more about numbers and being acquainted with them will not only enrich our lives but also contribute towards managing our day to day affairs much better.

At three, I fell in love with numbers. It was sheer ecstasy for me to do sums and get the right answers. Numbers were toys with which I could play.

I learned how to make an endoscope using a Swiss Army Knife, a cell phone camera, cell phone, and chewing gum.

I've never really seen archaeology as being any different from history. What I love are the stories of human beings that were around 1,000 years ago and how they lived - archaeology is another aspect to that.

I believe 168 is my division and I'm willing to take on all-comers.

America has always built ourselves out of adversity. All the way back to the Great Depression.