Welcome to “Mental Math Foundations”—a course which will bring your mental math skills up several levels, so that you can be confident in numerical situations in your professional life, everyday life, job interviews and aptitude tests, or for any advanced mental math that you might choose to study.
I’m Daniel Timms—based in the UK. I studied Mathematics at university, worked as a software engineer for 5 years, and then got heavily involved in competitive Mental Math (mental calculation).
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Since 2020, I’ve given private coaching in Mental Math to more than 80 students. Most of these students were adults who realized that Mental Math would be useful for their career in finance or business. Others were interested for personal reasons or anticipated joining a competition.
Over time, I found that certain topics were important to most of the students, and that I was explaining them separately to each student. For this reason, I collected these “foundations” and started building this course in 2024 so that in the future I can coach more efficiently and support more students—including you. You can consider that you are being coached by me—but in an asynchronous format so that you can work at your own pace.
How to Study Mental Math
Compared to other branches of Mathematics, the amount of theory in these Mental Math Foundations is actually quite light. You don’t need to learn complicated formulas.
However, practice is important—as Mental Math is a practical skill! To help you with your practice, I’ve built you a selection of training tools for you to work on the atomic processes that need to be solid in order to build the Foundations.
For each Foundation:
- Read the written materials and watch any videos, starting from the beginning of the Foundation.
- When instructed to try an exercise using a training tool, start working on this. Each training exercise has two goals:
- the “first checkpoint”; and
- the “main goal”.
- Continue with the training exercise until you reach the “first checkpoint”. You don’t need to read further lessons within this Foundation until you have reached that checkpoint.
- Track every practice session in the Google Sheet that I provided to you.
- Once you reach the “first checkpoint”, continue working on that exercise until you have achieved the “main goal”, but you can already look ahead to the next training exercise. You might find that you can work on 2–3 training tools concurrently within the same Foundation.
- Once you have achieved the “main goal”, you can continue working on it to build the Foundation even stronger. But by now, your focus should be on more challenging exercises!
- If you have any questions, you can contact me directly for coaching [depending on the course package you have subscribed to].
Expect the course to take a few weeks to a few months to complete (depending on your practice schedule).
Included in this Course
- Written materials covering the Five Foundations of Mental Math
- Video demonstrations
- Practice exercises in the Mental Math Gym
- Google Sheet fully set up to track your progress on the exercises
- Various supplementary materials
- [Depends on your package] Private coaching support from me
Extra Coaching Support
This course is designed so that you don’t need to rely on extra coaching in order to complete it. You can progress independently.
However, I do provide private coaching to give you extra support on your journey. Please check the terms of your course to see what support is included! Students use this for the following reasons:
- Troubleshooting and breaking through plateaus—I can often recommend an auxiliary training exercise, or find a adjustment to your technique.
- Deciding what exercise(s) to work on next, especially if you have a specific goal in mind.
- Learning advanced skills that build on the foundations in this course—such as square roots, estimations, or divisions by larger numbers.
- Real-life practice—such as simulating business scenarios and preparing for job interviews and aptitude tests.
You always have the option to book additional support at a favourable rate if needed. Many students with ambitious goals choose to do this, but you can make significant progress independently.