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When you study math, sooner or later, you probably want to use visual aids to help you see what numbers are telling you. (Later in this book, I show you how one picture can be worth a thousand numbers when I discuss geometry in Chapter 19 and graphing in Chapter 25.)

The tastiest visual aids you’ll ever find are those little square cheese-flavored crackers. (You probably have a box sitting somewhere in the pantry. If not, saltine crackers or any other square food works just as well.) Shake a bunch out of a box and place the little squares together to make bigger squares. Figure 1-1 shows the first few.

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FIGURE 1-1: Square numbers.

Voilà! The square numbers:

You get a square number by multiplying a number by itself, so knowing the square numbers is another handy way to remember part of the multiplication table. Although you probably remember without help that 2 × 2 = 4, you may be sketchy on some of the higher numbers, such as 7 × 7 = 49. Knowing the square numbers gives you another way to etch that multiplication table forever into your brain.

Square numbers are also a great first step on the way to understanding exponents, which I introduce later in this chapter and explain in more detail in Chapter 5.