Here are the best bits of number trivia I could get into neither the Ubercross Abecedaria N nor the small n!
23. In a group of randomly chosen 23 people, there’s more than a 50% chance that at least two have the same birthday.
66. “Order 66” is one of the more evocative bits of Star Wars lore, a secret command for Palpatine’s cloned soldiers to turn on the Jedi. George Lucas, with his ear for mythic traditions, was identifying Palpatine’s power play with 666, the legendary Number of the Beast.
(Some TV spinoffs imply the cloned soldiers didn’t even know what “Order 66” was until hearing its name activated some hidden part of their minds. That’s probably the only way Palpatine could surprise people who can usually sense violent or evil intent: by giving them nothing to sense until the last second.)
73. I’m no fan of The Big Bang Theory. I find it irritating, sort of a jock’s idea of what nerds are like, wrapped up in sitcom attitudes that were old hat when it started. Jim Parsons seems nice off camera, but his performance of Sheldon is nails on chalkboard to me.
But I’ll put up with it for the sake of Sheldon’s discourse on why 73 is the best number (performed in the 73rd episode of the show, by an actor who was born in 1973).
1729 figures into this anecdote by mathematician G.H. Hardy about mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan: “I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways’” (1729 = 13 + 123 = 93 + 103).
Darryl Francis notes this anecdote appears in the 2015 film The Man who Knew Infinity.
2240 is the number of pounds in an English “long ton.” Next to the 2,000-pound ton, the long ton just looks deeply (and delightfully?) weird.
3435 = 33 + 44 + 33 + 55. The only other number you can do this with is 1, which equals 11.
6174. Take any four-digit number with at least two different digits. Put its digits in ascending and descending order to make two numbers. Subtract one from the other. Do the same to the resulting difference (treating a three-digit number as “starting with 0”) and keep going. You’ll end up with 6174. I was a skeptic, but it works: I picked these three numbers at random:
1337 : 7331 - 1337 = 5994 : 9954 - 4599 = 5355 : 5553 - 3555 = 1998: 9981 - 1899 = 8082 : 8820 - 0288 = 8532 : 8532 -2358 = 6174
5343 : 5433 - 3455 = 1978 : 9871 - 1789 = 8082 : 8820 - 0288 = 8532 : 8532 -2358 = 6174
9210 : 9210 - 0129 = 9081 : 9810 - 0189 = 9621 : 9621 - 1269 = 8352 : 8532 - 2358 = 6174
20,067. The first natural number mathematicians don’t know what the heck to do with. Turns out the paradox was right: the first number the establishment declares “uninteresting” becomes interesting just because it’s claimed not to be. It’s like an ugly duckling: one can’t help but hope its day of swandom will come!
5318008 was the number we all discovered could spell “boobies” in our calculators in math class (as mentioned in the Big Bang clip above).
867-5309. You know how sometimes a song will show a clearly disturbed individual doing something no one should do, and some people treat it as a suggestion? Yeah, it was unfortunate that a lot of real people had this phone number when this not-really-a-love-song hit the airwaves. It is a bop, though.