A clever way to estimate enormous numbers - Michael Mitchell

Have you ever tried to guess how many pieces of candy there are in a jar? Or tackled a mindbender like: "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?" Physicist Enrico Fermi was very good at problems like these -- learn how he used the power of 10 to make amazingly fast estimations of big numbers.

Lesson by Michael Mitchell, animation by Mark Phillips.

[djoakeydoakey]

Enrico Fermi was at a pub, he asked the barman for 10 pints of beer. The barman replies, well that is an Order of Magnitude!

[Ayplus]

Wow. That was amazingly accurate for just guesses . What is this black magic u call estimation?

[ritwikbhandari]

I'm loving the energy from the 'power of 10' guy.

[FaceofFrequency]

These TedEd's are still pretty simple, but this one was very well done and useful. Not something everyone learns in school, let alone by 4th grade

[phanibhushantholeti]

The best part is the video doesn't talk of miles and gallons :D

[FootLettuce]

Obi-Wan is also a master in those Fermi problems. His overestimate of the high ground and underestimate of Anakin's power balanced out to yield a precise result of Anakin's next moves so that he could slice him off easily.

[voodoochile]

3:33 Narrator: Now I know what must be thinking.

Me: That guy’s gonna break those pianos? 🤷🏾‍♀️

[aspasricha]

How many Enrico Fermi's does it take to fix a lightbulb?

[kenbobca]

I like it, like it. Just a little too Fast for me.

[khaled]

Wow! I never knew that you could tune pianos by hitting them with a tool. It's probably the new way to do it! LMAO

[HappinessAWAITS]

I was so scared that guys finger was going to break when he pressed it against the phonebook D:.

[claycoppinger]

was that a especially disturbing animation to anyone else?

[sirmetaladon]

The constant "power of 10" advertising was quite funny. Keep it up!

[dulguunjargal]

Big respect to the person who read every phonebook in chicago to find those 81 piano tuners

[prateektopinkatti]

I ain't going to a single one of those 81 piano tuners if they're gonna hit my piano with a spanner like that.

[ridheesh]

I have been doing this all my life without realising there was a study of it, you learn something new everyday!

[brokenman]

but how can there be 3, 000, 000 people in Chicago if I'm the only person on earth

[GronTheMighty]

You can also apply the opposite principle of negative powers to easily reduce numbers that you need to memorize or add/substract in a rapid fashion, such as when figuring out how much your grocery shoppings are going to total.

I.e 12, 27, 33, 16, 98, 44, 51, and 61 you reduce to 1, 2, 3, 1, 9, 4, 5, and 6, totalling 31, multiply by 10 to 310, giving a decent estimate for the actual value of 342.

You can of course round up/down normally instead of forcing the round down if you want accuracy :)

[zaarthelizard]

0:22 that big dude can totally go faster than the speed of light

[billyspongemonkey]

This is a cool video! It would be really cool, and maybe helpful if there was an Engineering Notation video that follows this one. Now that everyone can understand the powers of ten with this video, I would like more people to know what I am talking about when I say things like: 4.8 Ghz, 12 pF and 1 k-ohms. Thanks for the video!