Jakow Trachtenberg

Yakov Trachtenberg ( born June 17, 1888 in Odessa, † 1951 or 1953) was a Ukrainian engineer and the inventor of the Trachtenberg quick calculation method.

Life

Trachtenberg received his engineering degree with honors in Saint Petersburg. Later he started for St. Petersburg Obukhov shipyard to work, where he was chief engineer. After the October Revolution Trachtenberg fled disguised as a peasant from the Soviets to Berlin. Here he found a new home and married the Countess Alice von Bredow, daughter of the court painter of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, he wrote articles for a magazine and pacifist as Russia expert published a book on the Russian industry.

After the seizure of power by the National Socialists he fell because of his critical attitude in distress and fled in 1934 with his wife to Vienna in Austria, where he was certainly to the German Reich only to the Anschluss. He was arrested, but escaped to Yugoslavia, where he first lived underground until he was again imprisoned and then spent five years in Gestapo prisons and concentration camps. Here he began to develop his mathematical methods, where he wrote nothing, as it were neither paper nor pens available. With the help of his wife, who bribed the guards, he escaped in 1945 in Switzerland.

In Switzerland, he developed his methods further and publish the " in 22 prisons and cellars of the Gestapo " Fast calculation method developed in the so-called Trachtenberg Primer. Just six days after the appearance of the first and second edition of its booklet were sold out. He gained some notoriety and taught his method until his death from a he founded the Mathematical Institute in Switzerland.

Worldwide, it has been known Trachtenberg until after his death by the book The Trachtenberg Speed ​​System of Basic Mathematics of the American journalists arm Catler and Rudolph McShane, which made its quick calculation method known in the English-speaking world. The book became a bestseller. In Germany the book was published under the title The Trachtenberg quick calculation method.

The Trachtenberg quick calculation method

The Trachtenberg quick calculation method consists of a collection of rules to remember such as " You doubling each digit and add the neighbors " who were already partially known already, but were first systematically compiled and published by Trachtenberg.

Whether this method of calculation, however, was actually invented by him during the incarceration, is controversial. There are indications of a rapid calculation method of the Weimar Republic, which was then called the cross method or cross multiples and is attributed to a doctor named Ferrol. This cross multiples is methodologically identical with the learned of Trachtenberg in 1950 in Switzerland method.