[tdadams]

Interesting trivia

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[Gabz]

Very interesting.

but some people appear to have WAAAAAAAAAAAy tooo much time on their hands (not referring to you)

[JimVT]

so 99 came to mean 'the best there is'.

As in "Maxwell Smart?"

[D. Brian Carter]

2 Prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 13 and so on ...) are divisible only by themselves and the number one. The largest prime number yet discovered has 2,098,960 digits. If we were to print nothing except this number across all sections of today's and next week's Observers (containing around 250,000 words in each issue) we could just about fit the number in.

Just throwing my own bit of trivia in... this must be an older list. The largest Mersenne prime found so far is over 4 million digits... I'm not a mathematician, but that would seem to tell me that the largest known prime is well larger than this.

[Izzy Dunne]

Never heard of the "Golden Mean" (# 16 above), but it might be another name for Fibonacci's number, derived from Fibonacci's sequence.

The sequence is 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34....      (Each number is the sum of the two previous numbers in the sequence).

Divide any number in the sequence by its predecessor, and you get a number around 1.618 - the higher you go, the close you get to this magic number.

[Lyford]

bump...

[bedolido]

This is by far the most interesting post I have ever read (w/o skimming) on FR.

Thank you.

[17th Miss Regt]

Infinity is the largest number of all. Except, of course, for infinity plus one.

Ignorant writer. There are an infinity of infinities and they are of distinct cardinalities. The infinity this writer is probably talking about is the number of whole numbers, which is the smallest infinity. For this infinity, that statement is false because the number of elements in a set with "infinity" elements can be placed into one-to-one correspondence with a set containing the same elements, but with one additional element added.

There are different types of infinities as well. The number of points on a line segment greatly exceeds the number of whole numbers, and this can be shown fairly easily. For more information, see any good undergraduate text in real variables.

[SauronOfMordor]

18 Eleven days were skipped in 1752 when the Gregorian calendar replaced the previous Julian calendar, which had got out of synch due to inaccuracies in measuring the earth's orbit. A London mob rioted, furious at losing eleven days of their lives.

The actual reason was that landlords charged a full month's rent, for that short month

[Izzy Dunne]

What have the Arabs ever done for us? Nothing, or zero to be more precise. Abstract mathematics were a mystery to the Western world until the introduction of the number zero from Arabia in the tenth century.

There's some question about this, at least in my mind. I thought the Arabs obtained the concept from the folks in India, and popularized it.
Marketing, not engineering.

[Range Rover]

re: #9 on the list...

The Mayans understood the concept of "zero" many centuries before the Arabs.

[KarlInOhio]

1 If your precocious nine-year old daughter asked you to place one penny on the first square of a chessboard, two pence on the second square, four pence on the third, and so on, you would need to put £92 million billion on the 64th and final square.

The last square would contain 2^63 pence
= 92233720368547758.08 pounds
= 92.23 x 10^15 (approx)
= 92.23 x 10^6 x 10^9.

That would be 92.23 million billion with the American definition of billion instead of the British one.

Once again American Hegemony triumphs over old Europe. :-).

[Loyal Buckeye]

Another interesting take on numbers:

A professor of mathematics sent a fax to his
> wife:
>
> *
> > Dear Wife:
> > You must realize you are 54 years old and I have
> certain needs
> > which you are no longer able to satisfy. I am
> otherwise happy with you
> > as a wife. I sincerely hope you will not be hurt
> or offended to learn
> > that, by
> > the time you receive this letter, I will be at the
> Grand Hotel with my
> > 18-year old teaching assistant. I'll be home
> before midnight.
> > Your Husband
> >
>
>
>
>
>
> When he arrived at the hotel, a faxed letter waited
> for him:
>
>
>
>
> > Dear Husband:
> > You, too, are 54 years old and by the time you
> receive this
> > letter, I will be at the Breakwater Hotel with the
> 18-year old pool
> boy.
> > Since you are a mathematician, you will appreciate
> that 18 goes into
> 54
> > more times than 54 goes into 18. Therefore, don't
> wait up.
>

[January24th]

Thanks for this. Bookmarked for fun reading at lunch...

[Sgt_Schultze]

bump

[bruin66]

You realize, of course, that there are no uninteresting numbers, and I can prove it. Also, a horse has an infinite number of legs. I can prove that, too.

[Centurion2000]

bump

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

Infinity is the largest number of all. Except, of course, for infinity plus one.

Also:

x/2 = 2x,
where x = infinity

:-)

[gcruse]

Three is the magic number',

No, no, no.  The number of 'no's nothwithstanding,
the magic number is one.  That's how many universes
we live in and how many there are of me.  Nothing
else matters.   :)