Monday 30 January 2017

Some Quite Interesting Numbers

Watching last week's QI on the BBC, they had a feature that I thought would be useful in school to ignite some interest in maths. 

What's interesting about these numbers?


The picture is the Mayan zero.

The '2 to the power of...' is the largest known prime number (at the time of writing).

If someone wrote out the numbers 1 - 10 billion in words and organised them in alphabetical order, 8,000,000,085 would be the first odd number.

142,857 is a cyclical number: multiply it by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 and the product (each time) is an anagram of it!

Frobenius number - Chicken nuggets are sold in 6s, 9s and 20s. 43 is the largest number of nuggets that can't be bought.   

There you go. Share them as they are, or even make an investigation out of some of them. Quite interesting.

2 comments:

  1. Why does "eight" (or indeed "eight billion") not come before "eight billion and eighty five"?

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    1. Ooops. Updated above. It'd be the first odd number. Thanks for pointing out.

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