John Trinkaus, who was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Literature Prize for publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him, got some recent attention for his how-well-do-people-guess-at-passwords research. The Chinese Apple site produced this video about that: Here’s a machine translation into English of part of what it says: “John Trinkaus, a professor at […]
Tag: number
WHO says: No who, no where
Innocuity is now a recommended goal in naming a disease. “Discovered a disease? WHO has new rules for avoiding offensive names” is the headline on a report by Kai Kupferschmidt, in ScienceInsider. It says, in part: The World Health Organization (WHO) mostly works to reduce the physical toll of disease. But last week it turned to another […]
The Fanciful Number 2.9013, Plus or Minus Nothing
Ig Nobel Prize (psychology, 2012) winner Rolf Zwaan writes, in his blog, about the vaunted — yet uncertain — value of a particular number: The Fanciful Number 2.9013, Plus or Minus Nothing Can we capture any aspect of human psychology in a single number? In 1956 a paper entitled The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two saw the light. […]
Erdos tells a joke
Mathematician Paul Erdos, he of the Erdos number, tells a joke: Here are some Erdos links: Reminiscences of Paul Erdos The Erdos Number Project Erdos and XKCD The book of books about Erdos: The Man Who Loved Only Numbers The Erdos centennial, in Hungary The documentary “Erdos — N Is a Number”: Paul Hoffman, author of […]
He’s the “k”, and has great Erdos and Bacon numbers
“He is the ‘k’ in G. W. Peck, a pseudonym for a group of six mathematicians,” says Wikipedia, which goes on to say: Kleitman has coauthored at least six papers with Erdős, giving him an Erdős number of 1. He was a math advisor and extra for the film Good Will Hunting.[5] Since Minnie Driver of Good Will Hunting appeared in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon, Kleitman […]
“The largest prime number in the world”
Investigator Leslie Lamport writes: ” I heard this today on public radio’s Marketplace: “A discovery of a lifetime (at least for the math geeks among us): the largest prime number in the world.” “This raises the interesting question of which prime numbers are in the world, and which only occur elsewhere.” Other news outlets are […]
Fibonacci songs
The Fibonacci series of numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, …) inspired these two songs (and—who knows?—maybe a whole series of others): (Thanks to investigators Cheryl Bain and Thomas Gallucci for bringing these to our attention.)
The more-than-seven ages of man (and woman)
William Shakespeare reduced the ages of man to a mere seven, in the play “As You Like It“. In this video, actor Benedict Cumberbatch presents that argument: In contrast, the maker of the video below went for a less literarily — but more mathematically — classical approach to age, assigning a different age for each year […]
George (“magical number seven”) Miller died this week
George Miller, who wrote the almost-magical essay “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two“, died this past week. The essay appeared in the Psychological Review (vol. 101, no. 2, 1956, pp. 343-352). It begins: My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded […]
That man Kaprekar and his damned number
Yutaka Nishiyama writes about a man and his curious number: The number 6174 is a really mysterious number. At first glance, it might not seem so obvious. But as we are about to see, anyone who can subtract can uncover the mystery that makes 6174 so special. In 1949 the mathematician D. R. Kaprekar from […]