the.com/multiplication table

The first spreadsheet humanity ever memorized by force.

means A chart showing the products of pairs of numbers (usually 1 through 10 or 12), used to teach and recall basic multiplication facts.

from The arrangement traces back to grid-based multiplication charts used in ancient Babylonian mathematics, and later versions appear in Chinese mathematical texts centuries before such tables became a fixture of schoolrooms. The format itself — a square grid pairing every number with every other — is sometimes nicknamed the 'Pythagorean table' in parts of Europe, a tribute (not a historical claim) to Pythagoras's association with number theory rather than evidence he invented it. The modern classroom version, drilled row by row into generations of children, owes less to any single inventor and more to the practical need, once arithmetic became standard schooling, for a fast way to memorize facts that would otherwise take forever to recompute by hand.

origin
Babylonians used base-60 versions 4000 years ago
hardest cell
seven times eight, globally the most forgotten fact
symmetry trick
diagonal splits it, half the grid is redundant
nine trick
digits of any nine times table always sum to nine
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