“A proposal to appear on the show came already last year when I was up to my ears in work preparing to defend my engineer diploma thesis,” says Daniel. “This year, there was nothing to stop me from taking up this challenge. Having decided to be on the show, I made one condition to the producers. I wanted to showcase exponentiation skills right from the outset.”

The tasks assigned to the young show contestant were extremely difficult for an average person. Daniel had 3 minutes to calculate and write down on the board the results of three exponentiation operations, such as raising 19 to the power of 20.

“To avoid exerting my mind too much, I used certain methods in my calculations, e.g. relationships between numbers,” he explains. “But the primary method I used was mnemonics. I worked out a very robust system, specially dedicated to numbers. People are not naturally born to compute numbers, unlike computers, which do it in a binary system. Magnificent as they are, figures tell us nothing. To calculate them we need images and associations.

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