How To Multiply On Your Fingers And Thumbs

Who said multiplication is difficult? It's really easy when you use the fingers and thumbs on your hands and you can multiply the numbers between 1 and 4.

If you can do that then you can also multiply by 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. All it takes is your fingers and thumbs. It's so simple even young children can do it, they just need to be shown, and it's a lot of fun.

So now you want to know how to multiply with your fingers and thumbs, so let's get straight to it.

Put you open hands in front of you with your palms facing upwards. Your fingers and thumbs are going to represent the following numbers:

Thumbs = 6

Index fingers = 7

Middle fingers = 8

Ring fingers = 9

Little finger = 10

Your thumbs are always a six and your little fingers are always a ten. Also, to simplify things we will refer to thumbs as fingers.

Next, your left hand deals with the first number in the multiplication sum and your right hand deals with the second number.

Say you want to multiply 7 by 9.

STEP 1

On your left hand put down all your fingers up to and including 7. So that's your thumb and index finger.

STEP 2

On your right hand put down all your fingers up to and including 9.               

STEP 3

Any fingers that are held down count as 10 and get added together. So in our example we have two fingers down on the left hand and four fingers down on the right hand, a total of six fingers down and since each finger counts as ten that's a total of 60.

STEP 4

The number of fingers that remain standing on each hand now get multiplied together. On the left hand we have three fingers standing and on the right hand we have one finger standing, so we multiply 3 by 1, which is 3.

STEP 5

Add together the first total of sixty to our multiplication result of three. In other words add together the results of step 3 and 4. 

That's 60 + 3, which equals 63.

So this math multiplication trick gives 63 as the result of multiplying 7 by 9, which is the correct answer. Because 7 x 9 = 63.

You can actually use the same technique to multiply by five but you don’t put down any fingers on the hand representing five.

Watch this easy multiplication technique in my video and make sure you have learned how to multiply on your fingers.