[max51]

I think you have it backward. All that time/energy wasted memorizing multiplications could have been used to understand more complicated topics. It's a cool party trick but it won't make you better at solving problems past high school level. I would prefer to work with someone who understand the concepts well and how to apply them than someone who can recall 32x9 or 10 digits of pi from memory.

When people complain about the difficulty of their college math courses or the math problems they solve at work, I can assure that it's not because they had a hard time remembering the answer to a multiplication. In a lot of cases, the equations they are trying to solve don't even have numbers in them. And when there are numbers, you won't be able to calculate them mentally because they won't simplify like they do in a no-calculator math exam.

You might not have realized, but a lot of the work when designing a no-calculator exam is to make sure people can compute the numbers mentally. When you step out in the real world, 32x9 becomes into 32.091x9.1^1.1. It turns ugly real fast when you have to deal with real numbers instead of a carefully crafted exam question.