This later becomes Earth, but Earth is destroyed shortly before its calculation is complete. However, in the book this answer is meaningless without knowing the ultimate question, and so to calculate the ultimate question, a planet-sized computer is constructed. The title text (referencing Randall's suspicion that 6x7=42 may be wrong) is an allusion to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is said to be forty-two. The table is symmetric, indicating that Randall's form of multiplication is commutative. It is notable that some properties of mathematics are not followed, as sometimes smaller multiplicands multiply to a larger product than larger multiplicands, and sometimes two even multiplicands produce an odd product. Most of the values are transposed from their correct position (e.g., adding or subtracting one - or two, or three - from one or both multiplicands), some are "off by one" (or two, or by a factor of two), and some (mostly in the 1 row and column) could be created by adding, subtracting, or dividing the two factors instead of multiplying them. It is unclear how his values are derived, as they don't follow a consistent pattern, but it could be that when calculating products, he sometimes has to correct his mental arithmetic, perhaps thinking along such lines as "8*4 is 36.
In this comic Randall supplies his own alternative version of the multiplication table, with entirely incorrect values that nonetheless "feel" reasonably correct to him. Typically, elementary school children are taught to memorize the table of whole numbers up to 10 as part of learning arithmetic. Title text: Deep in some corner of my heart, I suspect that real times tables are wrong about 6x7=42 and 8x7=56.Ī "times table" (or multiplication table) is a table used to show the products of numbers.