The Personalities of Numbers [part 1 of 3]

Some people love numbers. And some find them odious and evil. And others manage to embrace both positive and negative sentiments at the same time. Take for example, mathematicians Jean-Paul Allouche, Benoit Cloitre and Vladimir Shevelev who have authored a paper with a distinctively Nietzschean title : ‘Beyond odious and evil’ in: arXiv:1405.6214v1 [math.NT] 23 May 2014

[Note: Odious numbers are numbers with an Odd number of 1s in their binary form. So, 13, which in binary is written 1101 is Odious.

Conversely, 27, which in binary is 11011, is Evil, because it has an Even number of 1s]

The conclusions that the team reach are difficult to summarise in a non-mathematical form, can we suggest that interested parties refer to the paper in full.

Coming soon: Happy numbers