Lessons from teaching gifted elementary school students (Part 6a)

Every so often, I’ll informally teach a class of gifted elementary-school students. I greatly enjoy interacting with them, and I especially enjoy the questions they pose. Often these children pose questions that no one else will think about, and answering these questions requires a surprising depth of mathematical knowledge.

Here’s a question I once received:

255/256 to what power is equal to 1/2? And please don’t use a calculator.

Answering this question is pretty straightforward using algebra:

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However, doing this without a calculator — and thus maintaining my image in front of these elementary school students — is a little formidable.

I’ll reveal how I did this — getting the answer correct to the nearest integer — in tomorrow’s post. In the meantime, I’ll leave a thought bubble if you’d like to think about it on your own.