Viagra keeps plants from wilting.
Israeli and Australian researchers found that a low concentration in water doubled the shelf life of cut flowers, from one week to two weeks.
Science & Math
Recursive Gratitude
Mathematician J.E. Littlewood once wrote a paper for the French journal Comptes Rendus. A Prof. M. Riesz did the translation, and at the end Littlewood found three footnotes:
I am greatly indebted to Prof. Riesz for translating the present paper.
I am indebted to Prof. Riesz for translating the preceding footnote.
I am indebted to Prof. Riesz for translating the preceding footnote.
Littlewood notes that this could have gone on indefinitely but “I stop legitimately at number 3: however little French I know I am capable of copying a French sentence.”
Math Notes
73 × 9 × 42 = 7 × 3942
All Art Is Theft
Irish astronomer William Parsons might have been surprised to see van Gogh’s The Starry Night appear in 1889.
He had drawn this sketch of the Whirlpool Galaxy 44 years earlier:
Pop Quiz
When calculating prodigy Truman Henry Safford was 10 years old, the Rev. H.W. Adams asked him to square the number 365,365,365,365,365,365 in his head. Dr. Adams wrote:
He flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes smiling and talking, and then seeming to be in agony, until in not more than a minute said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,225!
Safford (1836-1901) went to Harvard and became director of the Hopkins Observatory at Williams College. Strangely, his calculating abilities seemed to wane as he got older.
Math Notes
Euler’s Identity
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.”
Still a Sin?
A man’s likelihood of being gay increases by 33 percent for each older brother he has.
Audition
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.
A Stubborn Prime
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).