Finger Math - The (Brief) History of Chisanbop

Remember the kid in your class who looked like they were playing Mozart on the piano while doing long division? They weren’t. They were a Chisanbop master! This "finger-math" system, invented by Korean mathematician Hang Young Pai, promised to turn your hands into a human abacus. It was the sensation of the 70s, making its way onto national television programs like the 'Phil Donahue Show' and 'The Tonight Show,' where bewildered hosts watched in awe as kids did complex calculations with a series of frantic finger flicks.

Schools across the country, desperate for a new way to engage students with math, jumped on the Chisanbop bandwagon. Classrooms turned into a flurry of finger wiggling and thumb tapping, as teachers believed they were raising a generation of math geniuses. But just as Chisanbop was reaching peak popularity, a tiny, unassuming device entered the picture: the pocket calculator. Suddenly, a $20 gadget could do in a fraction of a second what it took a Chisanbop whiz an entire minute to do, and without the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. In this episode, we’ll explore the short-lived reign of Chisanbop and ponder the philosophical question: why did we ever think our fingers were better than a Texas Instruments TI-30Xa? Tune in and find out!"

Transcript

Kelly: 0:06

Hey, Alex, how are you today?

Alex: 0:08

Hey, Kelly, what's up? I've

Kelly: 0:10

got a really interesting dead end for us to talk about. It's something that I'm sure you've heard of, but you might not really know much about, but it's it's attached right to both of us.

Alex: 0:23

Oh, attached.

Kelly: 0:24

Yeah, yeah.

Alex: 0:27

So you mean, like a funny bone,

Kelly: 0:30

it's, it's actually the finger. It's all your fingers. I want to talk about our fingers. We've talked

Alex: 0:35

about movers. How could those be dead ends? Well, it's

Kelly: 0:39

a certain style of figuring out mathematics using your fingers. Have you heard of this

Alex: 0:48

counting with my fingers? It's

Kelly: 0:50

where you put your hands on the table and you raise your fingers up and down in a certain kind of way to calculate numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication, stuff like that. Is that an Asian thing? Yeah, it's called Chisholm bop.

Alex: 1:09

It is Asian, right?

Kelly: 1:10

It was actually invented by a Korean, but he invented it and he came to the US, and it really took off in the United States.

Alex: 1:21

Yeah, I think I have heard about this a little bit. Tell me more about

Kelly: 1:25

it. Chis and Bob. So this was something that originally came from a guy named hung young pi, and that's PA. I think I'm saying it correctly. He was a accountant in Korea. He was born in 1943 and he was actually married to a woman who came to the United States on a student visa. She was an artist. She lived in the US in she went to school in California at first, and then she moved to New York and was doing art. She lived in the US for a year before she even told anybody that she was married. And when she told a man in the United States who was kind of a wealthy man who had kind of taken her under his wing in a good way, there wasn't anything weird going on there, when she said that she was married, he said, bring your husband over. He should come over. So that's how hung young pi came to the United States. Now, hung young pi, as I said, was a accountant, and his father was a mathematician, and he was very good at math, and he came up with this idea that you could do simple arithmetic or even more complex arithmetic using your fingers. And in Korea, chi CH, I means finger and sand. Bop is calculation. So it's finger calculation in Korea. So, so now that I say that word, Chisholm, Bob does that? That ring a bell to you? Not

Alex: 2:56

at all. No, I never knew there was a word for that. Yeah, I've seen people do it, hmm,

Kelly: 3:01

did you used to do it? No, no, I I wish I had. I did number sense. That was, which was a UIL competition, and I was pretty good at just adding numbers in my head. But these kids could do these bragging about, I think you've bragged about that before. I probably have, because I think I won first place in sixth grade or something in numbers. I

Alex: 3:21

think we talked about doing math in your head, how that was like a competition, and you found a way to talk about your UIL trophy,

Kelly: 3:30

which I still have. No I was never a Chisholm Bob kid, but what happened is, hung came to the United States, and he actually got a job in a Korean school in New York, and he was teaching, starting to teach Chisholm bop to the kids in this Korean school. Well, there was a guy there named Ed Lieberthal. Now, Ed was a television writer, a producer, kind of a big personality. He wasn't necessarily on camera, but he was well known in the television space during this time in the in the 70s in New York. Well, Ed and his wife had adopted two kids from Korea. And so guess where his kids went to school, at the Korean school in New York. And guess what they started learning. They started learning Chisholm Bob. They came home and they demonstrated it for their father and their mother, their adopted father and mother and Ed and his wife were just blown away. They were like, This is really something that these kids are doing math so quickly now, the way Chisholm bop works, if you have familiar with actually, any of the ways that that goes,

Alex: 4:39

no, but is this something you're gonna be able to teach me right now?

Kelly: 4:44

You could learn it in five minutes on YouTube. I don't know that I could teach you right now, but on one hand, you have one to nine, and then on the other hand you have your 10s, so your four fingers on your right. Hand are 12345678, and then your thumb is nine. And then on the left hand,

Alex: 5:08

wait, you already lost me before you put your hands on on the table. Got it

Kelly: 5:16

so you go through your your fingers like in kind of a spider position, you go through your fingers, 1234, touching the table. 12345678, and then your thumb becomes nine. Wait, what's the 5678, going the other way, going no, just going twice the second time through. Okay. And then your left hand is your 10s. So it's 1020, 3040, 5060, 7080, 90, and there's ways to basically lift your finger or tap your finger that give you a number. It's like, it's like your fingers are your pocket calculator.

Alex: 6:01

So if I said 3645 times, 17, you could do that if

Kelly: 6:08

I knew Chisholm Bob, yes, yes, absolutely. So. So these kids come home, as I said, the two adopted children from Korea of Ed Lieberthal and his wife come home, he gets all excited about it. Now, Ed has worked in television, and he knows that this is something that could be popular. Could get some local news segments. So he gets on the local news. Well, the local news in New York is big. You know, there's lots of people in New York, and it gets picked up, and Phil Donahue wants to see him. The Today Show wants to see him. Johnny Carson wants to see him. And he gets several kids, including his own, that are very good at Chisholm Bob, and he brings them on these shows. And he has Johnny Carson, for example, actually with a calculator. And this is the late 70s. So pocket calculators for the home are just becoming popular like that. Wasn't something that really existed in the 60s or the early 70s. They were, like, 100 bucks. Yeah, yeah. They were expensive. And they, I mean, I think they are pretty much the same as they are today. But, you know, everybody has a calculator on their phone. He would read off these sequences of numbers to add or subtract or multiply. And he would have Johnny Carson, for example, do this on a on a pocket calculator. And he would have these two girls that were with him do it with Chisholm, Bob and and the thing is, Ed McMahon, or whoever, somebody else had just written the numbers down so the girls didn't know what the numbers were. Ed Lieber, Lieberthal didn't know what the numbers were. Johnny Carson didn't know what the numbers were, but consistently, the girls got the the answers right and got them quicker than somebody with a calculator. Nice. It was sort of revolutionary that that these kids were learning. It's a different style of learning. They were learning in more of a physical way, but it's very simple, actually. And again, I wish I had spent a little more time actually learning it, but if you watch a YouTube video about it in five or 10 minutes, you can understand the basics. You can do it slowly. What these kids would do is they would practice again and again, and that would become muscle memory for them. You know, it's like like a guitarist who can play every note or every scale on the guitar. They don't have to think about it. It just happens, right, right?

Alex: 8:27

So I guess the question is, are they really learning math or learning something else?

Kelly: 8:31

That's actually exactly where the a lot of the disadvantages and the critiques of Chisholm Bob came in. First of all, you in order to go beyond 99 you have to remember a number like you have to actually bank a number in your head and then you add it to or subtract it from that number that's above 99 there's no negative numbers. I

Alex: 8:54

thought you were gonna say they have to take the shoes off.

Kelly: 8:59

That would be, that would be, I'm trying to think of a funny name for Chisholm bop with your toes, but I can't think of one. Anyway, the teachers kind of thought it was gimmicky. It didn't really help with with concepts like algebra or fractions or negative numbers. It was really just a way to learn how to do addition, subtraction and multiplication very quickly, you know, especially now. Now they could do numbers higher than 99 but they had to be more advanced, and they had to be able to remember certain things between one and 99 it's all just like, literally, you could watch that five minute YouTube video. I keep saying that, and then if you follow the steps you could figure out how to do the numbers between 199

Alex: 9:44

it's too bad that it came out right at the same time, or they got popular at the same time, as calculators, as the pop it seems like something that if it had been more popular, like 100 years prior, it would have been really something, well,

Kelly: 9:59

um, you know. Actually there was a version of it that was more popular. It was the abacus. So it's very similar. The concept of the Chisholm bop is similar to the concept of an abacus. You're physically moving things around in order to remember or to know what numbers are. Now I've played with an abacus. Have you ever? You ever tried one or played with one?

Alex: 10:20

Yeah, I think anybody who's a dad has probably gotten one for Father's Day at some point.

Kelly: 10:26

That's an odd Father's Day gift, honestly. But I think, I think after I won that contest in sixth grade, did I mention that contest? Yeah, I was inundated with

Alex: 10:36

liquid and the UIL math contest. You, you got plenty of content there,

Kelly: 10:41

but that's right, it's all I'm going to talk about. It is, it is actually rumored that Bill Gates learned Chisholm Bop, and it helped with his coding. And he started, he actually wrote a spreadsheet that would automate Chisholm Bob, that would actually like replicate what each finger was. And I think there was some unconfirmed reports that Weird Al Yankovic was also a fan of Chisholm bop. Oh, you know that's true, yeah. I mean, just the name, right? But it's less funny when you actually know what the origin of the name being Korean for finger and calculation. Well, you know, as all good things happen, it kind of took off. Public schools started to use it. The the two founders, the gentleman from Korea, hung young pi and Ed Lieberthal, they incorporated. They wrote a book, they put out courses, they did all this stuff, and people were buying it. But much like pet rocks, it soon faded away. Educators didn't think it was as important as concepts in math, you know, that you could actually learn concepts about schools started to phase it out, like it was kind of adopted and then taken away very quickly from more progressive schools. And at that point, calculators, computers, apps, all that stuff started to become popular. And you know, if your method can be replaced by a$1 calculator? Yeah, it's probably not built for the long

Alex: 12:13

haul. So just basically a party trick today.

Kelly: 12:17

Yeah, yeah, it is now. Now there are some, there are some people that are enthusiastic. And again, if you go to Reddit or YouTube, you'll find people doing Chisholm Bop and really into it. It's also sometimes taught for home schoolers, and it's supposed to be something that's very handy if you don't necessarily get math as a child because it's a different way of approaching it.

Alex: 12:45

Yeah? And I'm all for anything that, like, you know, teaches somebody in a different, alternative way, as long as it's not just a party trick

Kelly: 12:56

or a finger fad, yeah, yeah. Well, that was chisen Bop. There is a 60 minute documentary on YouTube, if you search for like, the history of Chisholm Bop, and it tells all about the PI family, and actually interviews with the daughter of the guy that invented it. And it talks more about, actually, the mother who was over here as an artist, she was still alive when this was produced. Unfortunately, Hong actually died. So Hong, young pi, is no longer around, but his wife still is. His daughter still is, and Chisholm Bob still is. It's one of those things that maybe we bopped along and we realized that the answer was always right here in our fingers. So next time on this episode of finger fads, we're going to talk about the shady underworld of thumb wars. Stay tuned.

Alex: 13:54

Oh, nice and, and I'd like to hear later how that guy invented The pie chart

Kelly: 14:02

because his last name was pie you.

Unknown: 14:34

Cowling on my fingers like a mathematician, fast as lightning. No calculator, competition, thumbs, all the heroes pick is bring the flag. She's. Them up. She's no negatives, just positives. A joyful meth parade. Mother pocket a parade, tap, tap, tap, numbers flying off my hand. A classroom. Carnival wasn't in grand. The teachers not in the kids at all. But tank March didn't expose the floor. Chisholm by fingers retired calculator stole the show. In nostalgia, days, 10 fingers, 10 dreams, solving life, schemes, math as an art was slow, but My silicon chips took over. Silicon chips, delight adding some positives. A joyful left parade on the pocket calculator. Oh, it threw us in the shade. She's alive. She's alive. She's.