You know these numbers:
On the surface they appear unrelated. e is the base of natural logarithms, i is imaginary, π concerns circles. But, amazingly:
Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce told a class, “It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.”
A man’s likelihood of being gay increases by 33 percent for each older brother he has.
In 2004 a mysterious billboard appeared in Silicon Valley; Cambridge, Mass.; Seattle; and Austin, Texas. It read:
{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com
Most people know that e (2.718281828 …) is the base of natural logarithms, but searching it for a 10-digit prime string is a considerable task — the first such string, 7427466391, starts at the 101st digit.
Solvers who went to http://7427466391.com found an even more difficult problem to solve. But solving that led them to a page at Google Labs … inviting them to submit a resume.
Type 120121 into a calculator and you’ll find it’s prime every way you look at it: right side up, upside down (121021), in a mirror (151051), or both (150151).
35 – 32 – 52 = 75 – 72 – 52
A neutron walks into a bar and orders a beer.
“How much do I owe you?” he says.
“For you,” says the bartender, “no charge.”
The integral z-squared dz
From one to the cube root of three
Times the cosine
Of three pi over nine
Equals log of the cube root of e.
144648 = 861 × 168 = 492 × 294
185472 = 672 × 276 = 384 × 483
9949716 = 2583 × 3852 = 1476 × 6741
16746912 = 2556 × 6552 = 4473 × 3744
Every even number is the sum of two primes.
Is that true? No one knows. Originally proposed in 1742, it’s been tested as far as 1018, but the jury’s still out.
James Bond never really explains why he likes his martinis “shaken, not stirred,” so in 1999 the University of Western Ontario’s biochemistry department decided to find out.
They discovered that a shaken gin martini has stronger antioxidant properties than a stirred one — which would help Bond avoid cardiovascular disease, stroke, and cataracts.
In their writeup for the British Medical Journal, they conclude, “007’s profound state of health may be due, at least in part, to compliant bartenders.”
See also Silly Old Bear.