Books by Jakow Trachtenberg

5. Rudolf McShane and Jakow Trachtenberg, The Trachtenberg System of Basic Mathematics .  From this I learned how powerful the individual human mind could be, and also how much school wasn’t teaching me.  It began to occur to me that the mainstream doesn’t necessarily have the best or only methods.  That said, non-mainstream approaches still have the responsibility of coming up with the right answer.  Query: does it these days ever make sense to actually use this stuff?