December 22 is celebrated as National Mathematics Day in India. Today is also the birthday of legendary mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.
India’s former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh declared December 22 as National Mathematics Day during Ramanujan’s 125th birth anniversary celebrations at the Madras University Centenary Auditorium 26 February, 2012.
So on this day let us check out some amazing mathematical facts and trivia that you can use to amaze your friends and family:
- The Fibonacci sequence is encoded in the number 1/89.
- The symbol for infinity (∞) was used by the Romans to represent 1000.
- A tablet from Susa, dating from the period 1900-1650 BC, uses the Pythagorean theorem to find the circumradius of a triangle whose sides are 50, 50, 60. Pythagoras himself lived in the sixth century BC.
- The term hundred depicts 100, but it comes from the word old Norse term, “hundrath”, which actually means 120.
- Zero is the only number that can’t be represented in Roman numerals.
- The spiral shapes of sunflowers follow a Fibonacci sequence.
- The word “Forty” is the only number spelling which is spelt with letters arranged in alphabetical order.
- A pizza that has radius “z” and height “a” has volume Pi × z × z × a.
- In a room of just 23 people there’s a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday.
- Every odd number has the letter ‘e’ in its spelling.
- 111,111,111 × 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321.
- If you concatenate all the palindromes from 1 to 101, the number produced would be prime! In other words, the number 123456789112233445566778899101 is prime.
- A ‘jiffy’ is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
- If there is a room full of 23 people, there are 50% chances that two people have the same birthday.
- The number 0 cannot be written in Roman numerals. And also, 0 is considered to be an even number.
- 555 is a number used as a laugh in Thailand, that’s because 5 is pronounced as “Ha”
PNN