What are the meaning(s) and context(s) of intellectual capital (IC) numbers? Specifically the number 42? The number which, as those familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will know, was the (eventual) answer given by the gargantuan computer Deep Thought in response to “The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. John Dumay […]
Tag: numbers
The Personalities of Numbers [part 3 of 3]: ‘Weird Numbers’
Numbers can be many things to many people. They can be Happy, Unhappy, Evil, or Odious. Perhaps now’s time to turn to Weird numbers (like 70) “A weird number is a number n for which σ(n)>2n and such that n is not a sum of distinct proper divisors of n.” Here is Dr. Giuseppe Melfi, professor at the University […]
The Personalities of Numbers [part 2 of 3]
Some numbers might be Evil or Odious but others are Happy. A Happy number can be described like this: “If you iterate the process of summing the squares of the decimal digits of a number, then it is easy to see that you either reach the cycle 4→16→37→58→89→145→42→20→4 or arrive at 1. In the latter case […]
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 […]