Finger Math - The (Brief) History of Chisanbop

Remember the kid in your class who looked like they were playing Mozart on the piano while doing long division? They weren’t. They were a Chisanbop master! This "finger-math" system, invented by Korean mathematician Hang Young Pai, promised to turn your hands into a human abacus. It was the sensation of the 70s, making its way onto national television programs like the 'Phil Donahue Show' and 'The Tonight Show,' where bewildered hosts watched in awe as kids did complex calculations with a series of frantic finger flicks.

Schools across the country, desperate for a new way to engage students with math, jumped on the Chisanbop bandwagon. Classrooms turned into a flurry of finger wiggling and thumb tapping, as teachers believed they were raising a generation of math geniuses. But just as Chisanbop was reaching peak popularity, a tiny, unassuming device entered the picture: the pocket calculator. Suddenly, a $20 gadget could do in a fraction of a second what it took a Chisanbop whiz an entire minute to do, and without the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. In this episode, we’ll explore the short-lived reign of Chisanbop and ponder the philosophical question: why did we ever think our fingers were better than a Texas Instruments TI-30Xa? Tune in and find out!"

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Episode Transcript

Kelly (00:06):
Hey, Alex, how are you today?

Alex (00:08):
Hey, Kelly, what's up?
I've

Kelly (00:10):
got a really interesting dead end for us to talk about.
It's something that I'm sureyou've heard of, but you might
not really know much about, butit's it's attached right to both
of us.

Alex (00:23):
Oh, attached.

Kelly (00:24):
Yeah, yeah.

Alex (00:27):
So you mean, like a funny bone,

Kelly (00:30):
it's, it's actually the finger. It's all your fingers. I
want to talk about our fingers.
We've talked

Alex (00:35):
about movers. How could those be dead ends? Well, it's

Kelly (00:39):
a certain style of figuring out mathematics using
your fingers. Have you heard ofthis

Alex (00:48):
counting with my fingers?
It's

Kelly (00:50):
where you put your hands on the table and you raise your
fingers up and down in a certainkind of way to calculate
numbers, addition, subtraction,multiplication, stuff like that.
Is that an Asian thing? Yeah,it's called Chisholm bop.

Alex (01:09):
It is Asian, right?

Kelly (01:10):
It was actually invented by a Korean, but he invented it
and he came to the US, and itreally took off in the United
States.

Alex (01:21):
Yeah, I think I have heard about this a little bit. Tell me
more about

Kelly (01:25):
it. Chis and Bob. So this was something that originally
came from a guy named hung youngpi, and that's PA. I think I'm
saying it correctly. He was aaccountant in Korea. He was born
in 1943 and he was actuallymarried to a woman who came to

(01:49):
the United States on a studentvisa. She was an artist. She
lived in the US in she went toschool in California at first,
and then she moved to New Yorkand was doing art. She lived in
the US for a year before sheeven told anybody that she was
married. And when she told a manin the United States who was
kind of a wealthy man who hadkind of taken her under his wing

(02:11):
in a good way, there wasn'tanything weird going on there,
when she said that she wasmarried, he said, bring your
husband over. He should comeover. So that's how hung young
pi came to the United States.
Now, hung young pi, as I said,was a accountant, and his father
was a mathematician, and he wasvery good at math, and he came
up with this idea that you coulddo simple arithmetic or even

(02:34):
more complex arithmetic usingyour fingers. And in Korea, chi
CH, I means finger and sand. Bopis calculation. So it's finger
calculation in Korea. So, so nowthat I say that word, Chisholm,
Bob does that? That ring a bellto you? Not

Alex (02:56):
at all. No, I never knew there was a word for that. Yeah,
I've seen people do it, hmm,

Kelly (03:01):
did you used to do it?
No, no, I I wish I had. I didnumber sense. That was, which
was a UIL competition, and I waspretty good at just adding
numbers in my head. But thesekids could do these bragging
about, I think you've braggedabout that before. I probably
have, because I think I wonfirst place in sixth grade or
something in numbers. I

Alex (03:21):
think we talked about doing math in your head, how
that was like a competition, andyou found a way to talk about
your UIL trophy,

Kelly (03:30):
which I still have. No I was never a Chisholm Bob kid,
but what happened is, hung cameto the United States, and he
actually got a job in a Koreanschool in New York, and he was
teaching, starting to teachChisholm bop to the kids in this
Korean school. Well, there was aguy there named Ed Lieberthal.

(03:52):
Now, Ed was a television writer,a producer, kind of a big
personality. He wasn'tnecessarily on camera, but he
was well known in the televisionspace during this time in the in
the 70s in New York. Well, Edand his wife had adopted two
kids from Korea. And so guesswhere his kids went to school,
at the Korean school in NewYork. And guess what they

(04:14):
started learning. They startedlearning Chisholm Bob. They came
home and they demonstrated itfor their father and their
mother, their adopted father andmother and Ed and his wife were
just blown away. They were like,This is really something that
these kids are doing math soquickly now, the way Chisholm
bop works, if you have familiarwith actually, any of the ways

(04:37):
that that goes,

Alex (04:39):
no, but is this something you're gonna be able to teach me
right now?

Kelly (04:44):
You could learn it in five minutes on YouTube. I don't
know that I could teach youright now, but on one hand, you
have one to nine, and then onthe other hand you have your
10s, so your four fingers onyour right. Hand are 12345678,
and then your thumb is nine. Andthen on the left hand,

Alex (05:08):
wait, you already lost me before you put your hands on on
the table. Got it

Kelly (05:16):
so you go through your your fingers like in kind of a
spider position, you go throughyour fingers, 1234, touching the
table. 12345678, and then yourthumb becomes nine. Wait, what's
the 5678, going the other way,going no, just going twice the
second time through. Okay. Andthen your left hand is your 10s.

(05:41):
So it's 1020, 3040, 5060, 7080,90, and there's ways to
basically lift your finger ortap your finger that give you a
number. It's like, it's likeyour fingers are your pocket
calculator.

Alex (06:01):
So if I said 3645 times, 17, you could do that if

Kelly (06:08):
I knew Chisholm Bob, yes, yes, absolutely. So. So these
kids come home, as I said, thetwo adopted children from Korea
of Ed Lieberthal and his wifecome home, he gets all excited
about it. Now, Ed has worked intelevision, and he knows that
this is something that could bepopular. Could get some local

(06:32):
news segments. So he gets on thelocal news. Well, the local news
in New York is big. You know,there's lots of people in New
York, and it gets picked up, andPhil Donahue wants to see him.
The Today Show wants to see him.
Johnny Carson wants to see him.
And he gets several kids,including his own, that are very
good at Chisholm Bob, and hebrings them on these shows. And

(06:54):
he has Johnny Carson, forexample, actually with a
calculator. And this is the late70s. So pocket calculators for
the home are just becomingpopular like that. Wasn't
something that really existed inthe 60s or the early 70s. They
were, like, 100 bucks. Yeah,yeah. They were expensive. And
they, I mean, I think they arepretty much the same as they are
today. But, you know, everybodyhas a calculator on their phone.

(07:17):
He would read off thesesequences of numbers to add or
subtract or multiply. And hewould have Johnny Carson, for
example, do this on a on apocket calculator. And he would
have these two girls that werewith him do it with Chisholm,
Bob and and the thing is, EdMcMahon, or whoever, somebody
else had just written thenumbers down so the girls didn't

(07:39):
know what the numbers were. EdLieber, Lieberthal didn't know
what the numbers were. JohnnyCarson didn't know what the
numbers were, but consistently,the girls got the the answers
right and got them quicker thansomebody with a calculator.
Nice. It was sort ofrevolutionary that that these
kids were learning. It's adifferent style of learning.
They were learning in more of aphysical way, but it's very

(08:02):
simple, actually. And again, Iwish I had spent a little more
time actually learning it, butif you watch a YouTube video
about it in five or 10 minutes,you can understand the basics.
You can do it slowly. What thesekids would do is they would
practice again and again, andthat would become muscle memory
for them. You know, it's likelike a guitarist who can play
every note or every scale on theguitar. They don't have to think

(08:24):
about it. It just happens,right, right?

Alex (08:27):
So I guess the question is, are they really learning
math or learning something else?

Kelly (08:31):
That's actually exactly where the a lot of the
disadvantages and the critiquesof Chisholm Bob came in. First
of all, you in order to gobeyond 99 you have to remember a
number like you have to actuallybank a number in your head and
then you add it to or subtractit from that number that's above

(08:52):
99 there's no negative numbers.
I

Alex (08:54):
thought you were gonna say they have to take the shoes off.

Kelly (08:59):
That would be, that would be, I'm trying to think of a
funny name for Chisholm bop withyour toes, but I can't think of
one. Anyway, the teachers kindof thought it was gimmicky. It
didn't really help with withconcepts like algebra or
fractions or negative numbers.
It was really just a way tolearn how to do addition,

(09:20):
subtraction and multiplicationvery quickly, you know,
especially now. Now they coulddo numbers higher than 99 but
they had to be more advanced,and they had to be able to
remember certain things betweenone and 99 it's all just like,
literally, you could watch thatfive minute YouTube video. I
keep saying that, and then ifyou follow the steps you could
figure out how to do the numbersbetween 199

Alex (09:44):
it's too bad that it came out right at the same time, or
they got popular at the sametime, as calculators, as the pop
it seems like something that ifit had been more popular, like
100 years prior, it would havebeen really something, well,

Kelly (09:59):
um, you know. Actually there was a version of it that
was more popular. It was theabacus. So it's very similar.
The concept of the Chisholm bopis similar to the concept of an
abacus. You're physically movingthings around in order to
remember or to know what numbersare. Now I've played with an
abacus. Have you ever? You evertried one or played with one?

Alex (10:20):
Yeah, I think anybody who's a dad has probably gotten
one for Father's Day at somepoint.

Kelly (10:26):
That's an odd Father's Day gift, honestly. But I think,
I think after I won that contestin sixth grade, did I mention
that contest? Yeah, I wasinundated with

Alex (10:36):
liquid and the UIL math contest. You, you got plenty of
content there,

Kelly (10:41):
but that's right, it's all I'm going to talk about. It
is, it is actually rumored thatBill Gates learned Chisholm Bop,
and it helped with his coding.
And he started, he actuallywrote a spreadsheet that would
automate Chisholm Bob, thatwould actually like replicate
what each finger was. And Ithink there was some unconfirmed
reports that Weird Al Yankovicwas also a fan of Chisholm bop.

(11:03):
Oh, you know that's true, yeah.
I mean, just the name, right?
But it's less funny when youactually know what the origin of
the name being Korean for fingerand calculation. Well, you know,
as all good things happen, itkind of took off. Public schools
started to use it. The the twofounders, the gentleman from

(11:26):
Korea, hung young pi and EdLieberthal, they incorporated.
They wrote a book, they put outcourses, they did all this
stuff, and people were buyingit. But much like pet rocks, it
soon faded away. Educatorsdidn't think it was as important
as concepts in math, you know,that you could actually learn

(11:47):
concepts about schools startedto phase it out, like it was
kind of adopted and then takenaway very quickly from more
progressive schools. And at thatpoint, calculators, computers,
apps, all that stuff started tobecome popular. And you know, if
your method can be replaced by a$1 calculator? Yeah, it's
probably not built for the long

Alex (12:13):
haul. So just basically a party trick today.

Kelly (12:17):
Yeah, yeah, it is now.
Now there are some, there aresome people that are
enthusiastic. And again, if yougo to Reddit or YouTube, you'll
find people doing Chisholm Bopand really into it. It's also
sometimes taught for homeschoolers, and it's supposed to
be something that's very handyif you don't necessarily get
math as a child because it's adifferent way of approaching it.

Alex (12:45):
Yeah? And I'm all for anything that, like, you know,
teaches somebody in a different,alternative way, as long as it's
not just a party trick

Kelly (12:56):
or a finger fad, yeah, yeah. Well, that was chisen Bop.
There is a 60 minute documentaryon YouTube, if you search for
like, the history of ChisholmBop, and it tells all about the
PI family, and actuallyinterviews with the daughter of
the guy that invented it. And ittalks more about, actually, the

(13:19):
mother who was over here as anartist, she was still alive when
this was produced.
Unfortunately, Hong actuallydied. So Hong, young pi, is no
longer around, but his wifestill is. His daughter still is,
and Chisholm Bob still is. It'sone of those things that maybe
we bopped along and we realizedthat the answer was always right

(13:41):
here in our fingers. So nexttime on this episode of finger
fads, we're going to talk aboutthe shady underworld of thumb
wars. Stay tuned.

Alex (13:54):
Oh, nice and, and I'd like to hear later how that guy
invented The pie chart

Kelly (14:02):
because his last name was pie you.

Unknown (14:34):
Cowling on my fingers like a mathematician, fast as
lightning. No calculator,competition, thumbs, all the
heroes pick is bring the flag.

(14:59):
She's. Them up. She's nonegatives, just positives.
A joyful meth parade. Motherpocket

(15:37):
a parade, tap, tap, tap, numbersflying off my hand. A classroom.
Carnival wasn't in grand. Theteachers not in the kids at all.
But tank March didn't expose thefloor. Chisholm by fingers

(16:02):
retired calculator stole theshow.
In nostalgia, days, 10 fingers,10 dreams, solving life,

(16:30):
schemes, math as an art wasslow, but My silicon chips took
over. Silicon chips, delightadding some positives. A joyful

(17:11):
left parade on the pocketcalculator. Oh, it threw
us in the shade.

(18:00):
She's alive.
She's alive. She's.