In 1855, the town of Salitpa in southern Alabama applied for a federal post office. The residents had intended to name their community after nearby Satilpa Creek, but in completing the paperwork the applicant mistakenly crossed the L instead of the T. The town has been Salitpa ever since.
05/22/2026 UPDATE: Apparently Kathyrn, Alberta, was supposed to be named Kathryn, after the daughter of local farmer Neil McKay, who had donated the land, but a sign painter misspelled it. (Thanks, Dan.)
“There exist only two kinds of modern mathematics books: ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence.” — Physics Nobelist Yang Chen-Ning
According to John McPhee’s 1993 essay “Irons in the Fire,” the Austin, Nevada, ranching family Saralegui used to identify its cattle with the brand COW.
What’s the largest number that can be expressed in Roman numerals? If no single letter can appear more than three times in a row, then the highest we can go is 3,999, or MMMCMXCIX.
These 3,999 values contain in total 30,000 characters, and, pleasingly, reader Ian Duff finds that 5,600 are Is, 2,000 are Vs, 6,000 are Xs, 2,000 are Ls, 6,000 are Cs, 2,000 are Ds, and 6,400 are Ms.
(Thanks, Ian.)
The creature from the Black Lagoon has the best possible pedigree. As director Jack Arnold was planning the iconic monster’s 1954 debut, his eye fell on his Academy Award nomination certificate for With These Hands, a documentary he’d worked on three years earlier.
“I said, ‘If we put a gilled head on [the Oscar statuette], plus fins and scales, that would look pretty much like the kind of creature we’re trying to get,'” he told Cinefantastique in 1975. “So they made a mold out of rubber, and gradually the costume took shape.”
Former Disney animator Milicent Patrick and makeup artist Bud Westmore collaborated on the creature. “They gave him some human characteristics, which helped to make him sympathetic,” Arnold said. Today the film is regarded as a classic of monster horror — but it didn’t earn an Oscar.
In 2016, University of Buenos Aires computer science student Gonzalo Ciruelos worked out that the roundest country in the world is Sierra Leone, with a roundness index of 0.934 on a scale of 0 to 1.
He’d been inspired by David Barry, who’d found that the world’s most rectangular country is Egypt (0.955 on the same scale).
Metropolitan France is known as the Hexagon. I suppose each country has its claim to fame.
(Gonzalo Ciruelos, “What Is the Roundest Country?”, Math Horizons 26:3 [February 2019], 26-27.)
At the time of its completion under Hadrian, the Pantheon in Rome had the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome.
It still does. It’s held that record for nearly 2,000 years.
fIVe + sIX + seVen
5 + 6 + 7 = 18
IV + IX + V = 18
These are the only three consecutive numbers whose sum equals that of the Roman numerals embedded in their names.