Quick, what’s 172 squared?

Need a minute? Pencil and paper, perhaps?

After an hour with Mike Byster, that kind of mental math should be no problem at all.
Byster is a human calculator, able to crunch staggering equations in moments with nothing more than a little concentration.

He displayed his mathematical wizardry to students at Hadley Junior High School in Glen Ellyn Dec. 20 and, more amazingly, showed them that they could do it, too.
“I’m going to tell you stuff you can take home tonight and freak — freak — your parents out,” he told the eager students.

Byster gives hundreds of similar presentations in schools across the country each year, all in an effort to make learning more appealing.

With a whirlwind of mental agility — such as dividing three-digit numbers out to several decimal places — he hopes to show that math can be enjoyable.

Byster, who lives in Skokie, spent the entire school day at Hadley, showing students how, with simple arithmetic and a few shortcuts, they could calculate long multiplication problems in their heads.

“You don’t have to be good at math. You just have to follow directions,” he said. “And following directions is one of the most important things in life.”

After one of the hour-long presentations, seventh-grader Jaime Acosta, 12, said he couldn’t wait to go home and wow his parents. He was good at math, he said, but not that good.

“They’ll get confused,” he said excitedly.

Byster’s strategy takes advantage of how the brain works. With patterns and mnemonic devices — a seemingly inane sentence used to memorize the planets, for example — people can grasp information quickly and store it indefinitely.

“If I could get them to have fun, maybe I could have their attitude changed toward math a little,” he said. “The kid who can’t memorize the multiplication tables memorizes hundreds of baseball statistics. That’s how I was when I was a kid.”

There’s no doubt that Byster’s mind is uniquely wired, but he maintains it’s something that students can learn themselves.

“The only kids in my whole life I’ve had trouble with are the kids who give up, who say ‘I can’t do it,’” he said.

Between presentations at the beginning and end of the school day, he visited seventh-grade math teacher Susan Dunn’s classes. After only a little instruction, they were tackling two- and three-digit-number multiplication problems without paper or calculators.

“We’re going to fly through this,” Byster warned them beforehand, “and you’re going to leave here with your head spinning.”

He jotted three problems on the white board along with the answers. Then he added a fourth equation, and encouraged the students to take a crack at it.

There was a pattern to every solution, similar to the tricks behind learning multiplication tables.

“Just look around,” Byster said. “Just look for patterns in your life.”

It did not take long for students to spot the trend, and soon they began shouting out answers as long as locker combinations.

Byster kept going with increasingly daunting math problems, but it wasn’t enough to slow the class down. It took 13-year-old Nathan Marcus just 10 seconds to rattle off the product of 106 and 107. (It’s 11,342, by the way).

Byster has been visiting schools for almost a decade and has given more than 5,000 presentations.

Before getting into the math business, Byster was a commodities trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He began visiting schools about 10 years ago, first giving a presentation to the math class that his cousin taught, then visiting his alma mater, Devonshire Elementary School in Skokie.

Word spread, and he began getting invitations from schools throughout the Chicago area and eventually from schools across the country. The demand grew, and last year he was featured on ABC’s “20/20.”

His notoriety exploded, and now he visits schools full time. In January he is launching a nationwide tour, but he plans on returning to Chicago schools every other week.

He does not charge for his visits, which allows him to go to even the most underprivileged schools, he said. Financial support instead comes from his company Brainetics, which sells learning games modeled after his lectures. The company was founded this year after Byster’s television appearance, but it remains in the background.

Wearing broken-in white sneakers and an effortless smile, Byster isn’t in the schools to sell a product. He didn’t mention Brainetics to the students at Hadley.

“I don’t even like talking about the product while I’m doing the show,” he said. “If I’m doing a show and I start hawking a product, I lose all credibility.”