There was a guy I was looking at,

young guy, 12-year-old from the United States

called Jacob "Jake" Barnett.

Actually, he did this thing on 60 Minutes

where he visualized numbers.

- What does six look like?

- Six, that's like

the edge points of that.

- So in this report, Jacob "Jake" Barnett

was showing how much of a genius he is.

And he actually showed a way that he visualizes numbers that's different.

I've never seen it before.

And the reporter didn't go into any detail.

He just said, "And this is how he sees 54."

But that wasn't enough for me

'cause I downloaded to the HD, download 1080p,

and I wanted to see it, so I blew it up

and just with that information,

just that picture and the number, I worked out what he'd done.

- This is when I do basic stuff.

This is 2 times 27, also known as 54.

- [Simon] Let's start with the number three.

How does he visualize three?

Here it is.

So why is it a triangle, Brady?

- [Brady] (laughs) Because it has three sides?

- [Simon] (laughs) It does have three sides.

But he's not interested in the sides Brady,

he's interested in the points.

So, one, two, three. Now, that's really important.

What about three times two?

So three times two is six.

So you might think three times two, six, hexagon.

Okay? But no.

And there's a reason why.

It's because a hexagon, six, six is not a prime number.

Primes are important to mathematicians,

so he wants to keep the primes.

Now, he wants to keep it, so what he does,

he actually puts a triangle on top of another triangle.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

So, let's keep going.

What about three times three?

All right.

So again, he starts with a triangle.

It happens to be red.

I don't know whether that was important or not.

Three times three, he doesn't put three triangles

on top of one another.

No, no, no.

Three times three, he puts triangles on the ends.

So that's why the ends, the vertices, are important.

So we've got one, two, three, four, five,

six, seven, eight, nine.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

That's nine.

Okay, next time what we're gonna do is we're gonna try times three again.

So, now we've got three times three times three,

nine, three is twenty-seven.

You should cotton on to how he does this now.

He puts triangles on the edges.

Check that out.

Triangle, triangle,

triangle, triangle.

So now there's one, two, three, four five, six, seven, eight, nine.

Nine, eighteen, twenty-seven.

But the reason why I understood this is because this is called...

What he's doing is prime decomposition.

So the fact is, the integers, the whole numbers,

you can write any whole number in its atomic form, which is primes.

- [Brady] This is like factorization.

- Exactly.

- This is 2 times 27, also known as 54.

- [Simon] So this is for the 60 Minutes report.

Two times three times three times three.

Okay?

So this is what he did.

If it's this times two,

well, it's pretty obviously what needs to happen.

We need to go uh, uh, uh.

And then you need to go uh, uh, uh.

Uh, uh, uh.

Uh, uh, uh.

Mm, mm, mm.

Mm, mm, mm.

And then you need to go mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm.

So that's it.

- [Brady] That's 54.

- [Simon] That's 54; there's 54 points.

So what's really good about this, better than just having 54,

is the fact that you can look into the number,

which is pretty cool 'cause you can look at it

and if you were shown a number, you can go,

"Oh, I know what this number contains."

It contains three, it's divisible by three,

not once 'cause there's another smaller triangle,

so it's divisible by three by three.

And there's another smaller triangle again,

so it's divisible by three by three by three.

So it's like an X-ray.

The only problem is

you don't know what the number is just by looking at it readily.

Like, I could put my pin number down

and I think it'd be quite safe

unless you paused it and worked it out.

But if I just flashed it, you wouldn't know what it is.

I don't know how it helps him.

I think, the thing I got out of it was the fact that, here's someone

who's not afraid to reimagine mathematics.

'Cause we get taught maths a certain way.

We get taught maths a specific way, base 10,

based on the fact that we've got these, okay?

And that's not math,

that's just one way of seeing maths.

And so, this is great because it's like,

it's intuitive, it's imaginative.

He's come up with it his own way.

Sure, this is like...

I saw the link to what we say is, you know, accepted mathematics.

Prime factorization of integers, accepted way.

But I mean, this is wonderful.

And for me, I got to kind of try and understand

this kid, this savant, who's gonna go on

and do amazing things.

He's gonna do amazing things.

And look, here he is

taking what we get taught at school

and having fun with it.

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- [Brady] And well, you won't be surprised to know

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