More or Less Is this Premier League striker a secret maths genius?
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Feb 7, 2026 
Rob Eastaway, author and maths communicator known for mental-maths tricks, shows how a cube-root stunt works and why it looks like wizardry. He walks through spotting first and last digits using small-cube patterns. He also discusses why Premier League goals have risen, linking changes like longer ball-in-play time to scoring trends.
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Footballer’s Mental-Math Party Trick
- Liam Delap stunned fans by quickly naming cube roots of large numbers in Chelsea Instagram clips.
- Rob Eastaway demonstrates this is a memory-and-pattern trick rather than prodigious raw calculation ability.
How To Extract Two-Digit Cube Roots
- Memorise cubes 1–9 and use the thousands to pick the first digit of a two-digit cube root.
- Use the predictable last digit of cubes (e.g., numbers ending in 5 cube to 5) to determine the second digit.
Small Tricks Open Big Math Doors
- Small tricks reveal number patterns and can be gateways into deeper mathematics.
- Rob Eastaway frames these puzzles as beautiful entry points to broader mathematical thinking.
