Today, we will share with you interesting and unusual facts from the world of this serious science. There is a place for the frivolous or simply fascinating in any exact science. The main thing is the desire to find it ...
The English mathematician Abraham de Moivre, in his old age, once discovered that the duration of his sleep was growing by 15 minutes a day. Compiling arithmetic progression, he determined the date when it would reach 24 hours - November 27, 1754. On this day he died.
Religious Jews try to avoid Christian symbols and generally signs that look like a cross. For example, students in some Israeli schools instead of the plus sign write a sign that repeats the inverted letter "t".
The authenticity of a euro banknote can be verified by its serial number of letters and eleven digits. You need to replace the letter with its serial number in the English alphabet, add this number to the rest, then add the digits of the result until we get one digit.
If this number is 8, then the bill is genuine. Another way to check is to add numbers like this, but without a letter. The result of one letter and number must correspond to a certain country, since the euro is printed in different countries. For example, for Germany it is X2.
The word "algebra" sounds the same in all languages of the world. It is of Arabic origin, and the great mathematician introduced it Central Asia late 8th - early 9th century Mahammed ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His mathematical treatise was called "Aljebr wal muqabala", from the first word of which the international name of science - algebra - originated.
There is an opinion that Alfred Nobel did not include mathematics in the list of disciplines of his prize due to the fact that his wife cheated on him with a mathematician. In fact, Nobel never married. The real reason for ignoring mathematics by Nobel is unknown, but there are several suggestions. For example, at that time there was already a prize in mathematics from the Swedish king. Another is that mathematicians do not make important inventions for mankind, since this science is purely theoretical.
The Reuleaux triangle is a geometric figure formed by the intersection of three equal circles of radius a centered at the vertices of an equilateral triangle with side a. A drill made on the basis of the Reuleaux triangle allows you to drill square holes (with an inaccuracy of 2%).
In Russian mathematical literature, zero is not a natural number, but in Western literature, on the contrary, it belongs to the set of natural numbers.
The sum of all the numbers on the casino roulette is equal to the number of the devil - 666.
In the state of Indiana, in 1897, a bill was passed legislating the value of pi to be 3.2. This bill did not become law due to the timely intervention of a university professor.
Sofia Kovalevskaya got acquainted with mathematics in early childhood when there was not enough wallpaper for her room, instead of which sheets with Ostrogradsky's lectures on differential and integral calculus were pasted.
In order to be able to do science, Sofya Kovalevskaya had to enter into a fictitious marriage and leave Russia. At that time, Russian universities simply did not accept women, and in order to emigrate, a girl had to have the consent of her father or husband. Since Sophia's father was categorically against it, she married a young scientist Vladimir Kovalevsky. Although in the end their marriage became actual, and they had a daughter.
The decimal number system we use arose due to the fact that a person has 10 fingers on his hands. The ability for abstract counting did not appear in people immediately, and it turned out to be most convenient to use fingers for counting. The Mayan civilization and, independently, the Chukchi historically used the decimal number system, using not only the fingers, but also the toes. The basis of the duodecimal and sexagesimal systems common in ancient Sumer and Babylon was also the use of hands: the phalanges of other fingers of the palm, the number of which is 12, were counted with the thumb.
In many sources, often with the aim of encouraging poorly performing students, there is an assertion that Einstein flunked mathematics at school or, moreover, studied badly in all subjects. In fact, everything was not so: Albert was still in early age began to show talent in mathematics and knew it far beyond the school curriculum.
Later, Einstein was unable to enter the ETH Zurich, showing the highest results in physics and mathematics, but not getting the required number of points in other disciplines. Pulling up these subjects, he became a student of this institution a year later at the age of 17.
One familiar lady asked Einstein to call her, but warned that her phone number was very difficult to remember: - 24-361. Remember? Repeat! Surprised Einstein answered: — Of course, I remember! Two dozen and 19 squared.
Every time you shuffle a deck, you create a sequence of cards that, with a very high degree of probability, never existed in the universe. Number of combinations in standard playing deck equals 52!, or 8x1067. To achieve at least a 50% chance of getting a combination a second time, you need to make 9x1033 shuffles. And if you hypothetically force the entire population of the planet over the past 500 years to continuously interfere with cards and receive a new deck every second, you will end up with no more than 1020 different sequences.
Leonardo da Vinci derived the rule that the square of the diameter of a tree trunk is equal to the sum of the squares of the diameters of the branches, taken at a common fixed height. Later studies confirmed it with only one difference - the degree in the formula is not necessarily equal to 2, but lies in the range from 1.8 to 2.3. Traditionally it was believed that this pattern is due to the fact that a tree with such a structure has an optimal mechanism for supplying branches with nutrients. However, in 2010, the American physicist Christoph Elloy found a simpler mechanical explanation for the phenomenon: if we consider a tree as a fractal, then Leonardo's law minimizes the likelihood of branches breaking under the influence of wind.
Ants are able to explain to each other the way to food, they can count and perform simple arithmetic operations. For example, when a scout ant finds food in a specially designed maze, it returns and explains how to get to it to other ants.
If at this time the labyrinth is replaced with a similar one, that is, the pheromone trail is removed, the scout's relatives will still find food. In another experiment, the scout searches in a maze of many identical branches, and after his explanations, other insects immediately run to the designated branch. And if you first accustom the scout to the fact that food is more likely to be in 10, 20, and so on branches, the ants take them as basic and begin to navigate by adding or subtracting the desired number from them, that is, they use a system similar to Roman numerals.
In February 1992, the Virginia 6 out of 44 lottery draw took place, where the jackpot was $27 million. The number of all possible combinations in this kind of lottery was just over 7 million, and each ticket cost $1. Entrepreneurial people from Australia created a fund by raising $3,000 from 2,500 people, bought the required number of forms and manually filled them out with various combinations of numbers, receiving a triple profit after paying taxes.
Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest theoretical physicists and popularizer of science. In a story about himself, Hawking mentioned that he became a professor of mathematics, having not received any mathematical education since high school. When Hawking began teaching mathematics at Oxford, he read his textbook two weeks ahead of his own students.
Laboratory studies have shown that bees are able to choose the best route. After localizing the flowers placed in different places, the bee makes a flight and returns in such a way that the final path is the shortest. Thus, these insects effectively cope with the classic “traveling salesman problem” from computer science, which modern computers, depending on the number of points, can spend more than one day to solve.
There is Benford's mathematical law, which states that the distribution of the first digits in the numbers of any data sets from the real world is uneven. Numbers from 1 to 4 in such sets (namely, birth or death statistics, house numbers, etc.) in the first position are much more common than numbers from 5 to 9. Practical use of this law lies in the fact that it can be used to check the accuracy of accounting and financial data, election results, and much more. In some US states, the non-compliance of data with Benford's law is even formal evidence in court.
There are many parables about how one person offers another to pay him for some service as follows: he will put one grain of rice on the first cell of the chessboard, two on the second, and so on: each next cell is twice as much as the previous one. As a result, he who pays in this way is bound to be ruined. This is not surprising: it is estimated that the total weight of rice will be more than 460 billion tons.
Pi has two unofficial holidays. The first is March 14, because this day in America is written as 3.14. The second is July 22, which is written 22/7 in the European format, and the value of such a fraction is a fairly popular approximate value of pi.
American mathematician George Dantzig, being a graduate student at the university, one day was late for a lesson and mistook the equations written on the blackboard for homework. It seemed to him more complicated than usual, but after a few days he was able to complete it. It turned out that he solved two "unsolvable" problems in statistics that many scientists struggled with.
Among all figures with the same perimeter, the circle will have the largest area. Conversely, among all figures with the same area, the circle will have the smallest perimeter.
Actually, moment is a unit of time that lasts about a hundredth of a second.
René Descartes introduced the terms "real number" and "imaginary number" into mathematics in 1637.
The cake can be cut into eight equal parts with three touches of the knife. Moreover, there are two ways to do this.
In a group of 23 or more people, the probability that two of them have the same birthday is over 50 percent, and in a group of 60 or more people, the probability is about 99 percent.
If you multiply your age by 7, then multiply by 1443, the result is your age written three times in a row.
In mathematics, there are: braid theory, game theory and knot theory.
Zero "0" is the only number that cannot be written in Roman numerals.
The maximum number that can be written in Roman numerals without violating Schwartzman's rules (rules for writing Roman numerals) is 3999 (MMMCMXCIX) - you cannot write more than three digits in a row
The equal sign "=" was first used by the British Robert Record in 1557. He wrote that there are no more identical objects in the world than two equal and parallel segments.
The sum of all numbers from one to one hundred is 5050.
In the Taiwanese city of Taipei, residents are allowed to skip the number four because they Thai the word is identical to the word "death". For this reason, many buildings in the city do not have a fourth floor.
The number thirteen, presumably, was considered unlucky because of the biblical story of the Last Supper, where exactly thirteen people were present. And the thirteenth was Judas Iscariot.
A little-known mathematician from Britain devoted most of his life to the study of the laws of logic. His name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. This name is not known to such a large number of people, but the pseudonym under which he wrote his literary masterpieces is known - Lewis Carroll.
Greek Hepatia is considered the first female mathematician in history. She lived in the IV-V centuries in Egyptian Alexandria.
The results of a recent study show that in areas of knowledge dominated by men, the weaker sex tends to veil typically feminine qualities in order to look more convincing. For example, female mathematicians prefer to go without makeup.
Did you know that one of the curved lines is called "Agnese Curl" after the world's first female professor of mathematics Maria Gaetano Agnese?
Lermontov, being versatile talented person, in addition to literary creativity, he was a good artist and loved mathematics. Elements of higher mathematics, analytic geometry, the principles of differential and integral calculus fascinated Lermontov throughout his life. He always carried with him a mathematics textbook by the French author Bezout.
In the 18th century, the chess machine of a Hungarian mechanic was popular Wolfgang von Kempelen, who showed his car at the Austrian and Russian courts, and then demonstrated it publicly in Paris and London. Napoleon I played with this machine, sure that he was measuring his strength with the machine. In reality, no chess machine operated automatically. A skillful living chess player was hiding inside, who moved the pieces. In the middle of the last century, the famous automaton came to America and ended its existence there during a fire in Philadelphia.
In a chess game of 40 moves, the number of options for the development of the game can exceed the number of atoms in outer space. After all, a huge number of options are possible - 1.5 by 10 to the 128th degree.
Napoleon Bonaparte wrote mathematical works. And one geometric fact is called "Napoleon's Problem"
Leaves on a branch of a plant are always arranged in a strict order, separated from each other by a certain angle clockwise or counterclockwise. The value of the angle is different for different plants, but it can always be described by a fraction, in the numerator and denominator of which are numbers from the Fibonacci series. For example, for beech, this angle is 1/3, or 120 °, for oak and apricot - 2/5, for pear and poplar - 3/8, for willow and almond - 5/13, etc. This arrangement allows the leaves to receive moisture and sunlight most efficiently.
In Russia, in the old days, a bucket (about 12 liters), a shtof (a tenth of a bucket) were used as units of measurement. In the USA, England and other countries, barrel (about 159 liters), gallon (about 4 liters), bushel (about 36 liters), pint (from 470 to 568 cubic centimeters) are used.
Small old Russian measures of length - span and elbow.
Span- this is the distance between the outstretched thumb and forefinger at their greatest distance (the size of the span ranged from 19 cm to 23 cm). They say "Don't give up a single inch of land", meaning not to give up, not to give up even the smallest part of your land. Oh very smart person say: "Seven spans in the forehead."
Elbow- this is the distance from the end of the extended middle finger to the elbow bend (the size of the elbow ranged from 38 cm to 46 cm and corresponded to two spans). The proverb has been preserved: “He is from a fingernail, and a beard is from an elbow.”
Quadratic equations were created in the 11th century in India. by the most a large number used in India was 10 to the 53rd power, while the Greeks and Romans only operated on numbers to the 6th power.
Probably everyone noticed on themselves and on those around them that among the numbers there are favorites for which we have a special predilection. We, for example, are very fond of "round numbers", i.e., ending in 0 or 5. Predilection for certain numbers, their preference for others, is embedded in human nature much deeper than is usually thought. In this respect, the tastes of not only Europeans and their ancestors, for example, the ancient Romans, converge, but even the primitive peoples of other parts of the world.
Every census usually sees an overabundance of people whose age ends in 5 or 0; there are far more of them than there should be. The reason lies, of course, in the fact that people do not remember exactly how old they are and, showing their age, involuntarily “round” the years. It is remarkable that a similar predominance of "round" ages is also observed on the grave monuments of the ancient Romans.
We consider negative numbers to be something natural, but this was far from always the case.
For the first time negative numbers were legalized in China in the III century, but were used only for exceptional cases, as they were considered, in general, meaningless. A little later, negative numbers began to be used in India to denote debts, but they did not take root to the west - the famous Diophantus of Alexandria argued that the equation 4x + 20 = 0 is absurd.
In Europe, negative numbers appeared thanks to Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci), who also introduced it to solve financial problems with debts - in 1202 he first used negative numbers to calculate his losses.
Nevertheless, until the 17th century, negative numbers were "in the pen" and even in the 17th century, the famous mathematician Blaise Pascal argued that 0-4 = 0 because there is no such number that can be less than nothing, and until the 19th century, mathematicians often discarded in negative numbers in his calculations, considering them meaningless ...
The first "computing devices" used by people in antiquity were fingers and pebbles. Later, tags with notches and ropes with knots appeared. in ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece long before our era, they used an abacus - a board with stripes along which pebbles moved. It was the first device specifically designed for computing. Over time, the abacus was improved - in the Roman abacus, pebbles or balls moved along the grooves. The abacus survived until the 18th century, when it was replaced by written calculations. Russian abacus - abacus appeared in the 16th century. They are still in use today. The great advantage of Russian abacus is that they are based on the decimal number system, and not on the five, like all other abacus.
The oldest mathematical work was found in Swaziland - a baboon bone with dashes (bone from Lembobo), which were presumably the result of some kind of calculation. The age of the bone is 37 thousand years.
In France, an even more complex mathematical work was found - an ox
whose bone, on which dashes are embossed, grouped in five pieces. The age of the bone is about 30 thousand years.
And finally, the famous bone from Ishango (Congo) on which groups of prime numbers are engraved. It is believed that the bone originated 18-20 thousand years ago.
But the Babylonian tablets with the code name Plimpton 322, created in 1800-1900 BC, can be considered the oldest mathematical text.
The ancient Egyptians did not have multiplication tables and rules. Nevertheless, they knew how to multiply and used the “computer” method for this - the decomposition of numbers into a binary series. How did they do it? That's how:
For example, you need to multiply 22 by 35.
We write down 22 35
Now we divide the left number by 2, and multiply the right one by 2. We underline the numbers on the right only when it is divisible by 2.
So, 
Now add up 70+140+560=770
Correct result!
The Egyptians didn't know fractions like 2/3 or 3/4. No numerators! Egyptian priests operated only with fractions, where the numerator was always 1 and the fraction was written as follows: an integer with an oval above it. That is, 4 with an oval meant 1/4.
What about fractions like 5/6? Egyptian mathematicians decomposed them into fractions with the numerator 1. That is, 1/2 + 1/3. That is, 2 and 3 with an oval at the top.
Well, it's simple. 2/7 = 1/7 + 1/7. By no means! Another rule of the Egyptians was the absence of repeating numbers in a series of fractions. That is, 2/7 in their opinion was 1/4 + 1/28.
There is always a place for interesting things, even in serious sciences, you just need to want to find them. Today you can learn interesting facts from such an exact science as mathematics.
1. Among the figures that have an equal perimeter, the circle has the largest area. Among figures that have equal area, it will have the smallest perimeter.
2. A moment is a very real time unit, lasting about 1/100 of a second.
3. The number eighteen is a unique number, because only its sum of digits is half that of itself.
4. If we consider a group of more than twenty-three people, then the chance that a couple of them will have a birthday on the same day is above 50%, and if we increase the group size to 60 and more people, it is almost guaranteed to happen.
5. Mental arithmetic is considered one of the innovative areas of education. This technique is designed to develop the child's talents, including arithmetic. As a result, children are able to mentally solve not only simple, but also complex problems. In order to understand what mental arithmetic is, you need to know about the essence of the program. It is worth noting that mental arithmetic in Asian countries, including China and Japan, is a mandatory subject for study in educational institutions. It can be a regular school lesson or an extracurricular activity. By the way, in modern times, you can easily attend online mental arithmetic classes at the Amakids Academy of Mental Arithmetic for Children.
6. There are such areas of mathematics as: knot theory, game theory and braid theory.
7. The cake can be cut with just three knife movements into eight identical pieces. By the way, two methods have been devised to accomplish this task.
8. Two and five are unique prime numbers, only they end in themselves.
9. Zero is a number that has no analogue in Roman numerals.
10. The equal sign we know was invented by Robert Record in the middle of the sixteenth century. 
11. If you add all the numbers from one to one hundred, you get 5050.
12. Since the mid-nineties in Taiwan, you can not write the number 4, which sounds similar to the word "death." By the way, in most buildings they don’t even make floor number four.
14. Charles Dodgson is an English mathematician who has devoted almost his entire life to the study of logic. However, he gained worldwide fame as Lewis Carroll, the British writer.
15. The first woman involved in mathematics was a resident of Alexandria, who lived one and a half thousand years ago. 
16. A student named George Dantzig was late for class and mistakenly thought the equations on the blackboard were homework assignments. With great effort, the future great mathematician still managed to solve them. Later it turned out that these were, as previously considered, “unsolvable” problems of scientific statistics, which stunned hundreds of mathematicians for a long time. 
17. Stephen Hawking said that he only learned math when he was a schoolboy. During his time as a teacher at Oxford, he studied their textbook, ahead of his own students by only a month. 
18. In the early nineties, a group of people decided to join forces in order to win the lottery. The jackpot reached about thirty million dollars, while the ticket costs a dollar. The group founded a fund, where each of the 2.5 thousand applicants invested $3,000. After the end of the draw, all of them were able to triple this amount.
19. Sofya Kovalevskaya, for the sake of doing science, decided to arrange a fictitious marriage. In the country, women were not allowed to do mathematics. The father did not agree to his daughter's departure to another country, then marriage became the only way. Interestingly, the fictitious marriage eventually became real and the couple even had a child. 
Even if you do not understand anything in mathematics, even if you hated this subject at school, even if you consider yourself a pure humanist ... In general, in any case, you will like these facts, we guarantee!
1. English mathematician Abraham de Moivre, in his old age, once discovered that the duration of his sleep was growing by 15 minutes a day. Having made an arithmetic progression, he determined the date when it would reach 24 hours - November 27, 1754. On this day he died.
2. Religious Jews try to avoid Christian symbols and generally signs that look like a cross. For example, students in some Israeli schools instead of the plus sign write a sign that repeats the inverted letter "t".
3. The authenticity of a euro banknote can be verified by its serial number of letters and eleven digits. You need to replace the letter with its serial number in the English alphabet, add this number to the rest, then add the digits of the result until we get one digit. If this number is 8, then the bill is genuine.
Another way to check is to add numbers like this, but without a letter. The result of one letter and number must correspond to a certain country, since the euro is printed in different countries. For example, for Germany it is X2.
4. There is an opinion that Alfred Nobel did not include mathematics in the list of disciplines of his prize because his wife cheated on him with a mathematician. In fact, Nobel never married.
The real reason for ignoring mathematics by Nobel is unknown, but there are several suggestions. For example, at that time there was already a prize in mathematics from the Swedish king. Another is that mathematicians do not make important inventions for humanity, since this science is purely theoretical.
5. The Reuleaux triangle is a geometric figure formed by the intersection of three equal circles of radius a with centers at the vertices of an equilateral triangle with side a. A drill made on the basis of the Reuleaux triangle allows you to drill square holes (with an inaccuracy of 2%).
6. In Russian mathematical literature, zero is not a natural number, but in Western literature, on the contrary, it belongs to the set of natural numbers.
7. American mathematician George Danzig, being a graduate student at the university, one day was late for a lesson and took the equations written on the blackboard for homework. It seemed to him more complicated than usual, but after a few days he was able to complete it. It turned out that he solved two "unsolvable" problems in statistics that many scientists struggled with.
8. The sum of all the numbers on the roulette in the casino is equal to the "number of the beast" - 666.
9. Sofya Kovalevskaya got acquainted with mathematics in her early childhood, when there was not enough wallpaper for her room, instead of which sheets with Ostrogradsky's lectures on differential and integral calculus were pasted.
Mathematics is an exact science that we begin to study at school. Then we find a use for it in Everyday life, ranging from the banal calculation of the amount of purchases in the store and ending with the use of high-tech items, the creation of which would be impossible without complex and accurate calculations.
As in any other science, a huge number of important and useful discoveries have been made in mathematics, so we can tell you a lot interesting facts.
Mathematics as a science was born 2000 years ago, and, of course, a lot of interesting things can be said about it. Let's single out several sections with facts about mathematics:
About numbers
- Translated from Arabic word“digit” means “zero”, but it so happened historically that now all numbers are called this word.
- 666 is the most mystical and legendary number. The sum of all roulette numbers is 666, and in the European Parliament there is a chair with this number, but according to a long tradition, no one sits on it.
- The Chinese do not like to use the number 4 because it is pronounced "death" in their language.
- Until the 19th century, negative numbers were practically not used, until the Italian merchant Pisano introduced them into habitual circulation in order to fix his debts.
- In Thai, the number 5 is pronounced "ha" and 555 is a slang phrase for laughter.
- Italians don't like the number 17 because also in Ancient Rome the phrase “I am no more” was written on the tombstones, which visually looked like VIXI (the numbers 6 and 11, the sum of which is 17).
Facts from the life of mathematicians
I was fascinated by exact science in my childhood. This was facilitated by the fact that, due to lack of money, her parents pasted the walls in her room not with wallpaper, but with lecture notes in mathematics. Already in adulthood for the sake of studying mathematics, Sophia had to arrange a fictitious marriage, because. in Russia of that time, women were forbidden to engage in science, and her father was against his daughter's departure abroad.
- The first female mathematician in history is a Greek woman named Hypatia, who lived in Egyptian Alexandria in the 5th century AD.
- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a little-known British mathematician, but he became famous all over the world as a writer under a pseudonym.
- Once an American mathematician George Dantzig, while still a student, was late for a lecture and mistakenly took the equations written on the blackboard for homework. With great difficulty, the future scientist coped with them, and later it turned out that these were two “unsolvable” tasks from statistics, on which several scientists had been working for more than one year.
- The genius of our time once shared that he studied mathematics only at school. And when I taught at Oxford, I just read a textbook intended for students a few chapters ahead.
- One of the most mysterious mathematicians -. The fact is that a lot is known about his works, but practically nothing is known about him: neither the exact date of birth, nor the date of death, nor other details of the biography. Only that he lived in Alexandria around the 3rd century BC.
- The oldest mathematical work was found in Swaziland (South Africa). It was a baboon bone, on which dashes for counting were embossed. According to scientists, the age of the bone is about 37 thousand years.
- The first mathematical records in the form of groups of prime numbers were also inscribed on bone, which is now about 19 thousand years old.
Bones with applied "numbers" - People have been counting since ancient times. First on the fingers, then using improvised materials (stones, branches), and then they thought of knitting knots on the ropes.
- In 1897, in the US state of Indiana, a bill was issued in which the value of pi was legally set to 3.2 (instead of the generally accepted 3.14). But thanks to the timely intervention of a professor from the local university, the bill never became law.
Application of mathematics in human life
In addition to the fact that scientists and inventors use the postulates of this fundamental science in their work, people of other professions not related to science also often resort to mathematical calculations in everyday life.
For example, when refueling a car, we multiply the cost of a liter of gasoline by the required volume and get the amount that will need to be paid. Making purchases in a store, counting whether there is enough money in a wallet or on a bank card account, we begin to estimate the total cost of goods by adding up their prices.
When making repairs in the house, we calculate the area of the walls based on their width and height in order to know how many rolls of wallpaper to buy.
Having decided to increase our income, we evaluate the benefit from deposits in a particular bank, calculate how much profit we will receive in monetary terms if we make a deposit at 7%, and if at 8.5%. Having decided to take a loan, each person evaluates how much he will have to overpay and whether it is worth it.
All this requires at least minimal mathematical knowledge.
Math facts for kids
It will be useful for students to know such interesting facts about mathematics:
- Among all geometric figures with the same perimeter, the circle will have the largest area.
- In mathematics, there are mirror numbers, they are called palindromes. The bottom line is that they read the same in both directions. For example, 13531 or 4567654.
- We use the decimal number system due to the fact that we have 10 fingers on our hands, and initially a person used his fingers to count something. But, for example, the inhabitants of the Maya and the Chukchi used to use the vigesimal number system, because. for calculations, not only the fingers of the hands, but also the toes were used.
Facts about mathematics that can be used for a wall newspaper
- The ancient Babylonians made calculations based on the sexagesimal number system, so it is now accepted that there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 degrees in a circle.
- The modern equal sign "=" was first used by the English mathematician Robert Record in 1557.
- The well-known work of the scientist "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" contains the simplest calculation errors that have gone unnoticed for more than 300 years.
- Zero cannot be written using Roman numerals.
- Every year on March 14 at 01:59:26, math lovers celebrate an unofficial holiday - Pi Day. This is the idea of an American scientist from San Francisco, Larry Shaw, who in 1987 noticed that according to the US date system (first month, then day), this day is designated as 3/14, and the indicated time coincides with the first digits of Pi.
Mathematics, especially higher mathematics, is a complex but very interesting science. On the one hand, it is abstract, but on the other hand, thanks to it, scientists make significant discoveries and create objects that contribute to the progress of human civilization. Yes and ordinary people knowledge of the basics of mathematics is necessary for solving everyday household issues.
Mathematics - exact science. Her theorems and axioms are known even to schoolchildren. But do you know modern interesting facts about mathematics? All the most unusual and surprising about this science you will find in this article.
Fact 1. Cursed 528 figure!
In 1853, mathematician William Shanks published his own calculations for pi, which he corrected by hand to the 707th decimal place. 92 years passed, and in 1945, it turned out that the last 180 digits were calculated incorrectly, that is, the mathematician made a mistake on the 528th digit. By the way, the scientist spent 15 years on such mathematical calculations.
Fact 2. Disease "dyscalculia"
Now the low grades in math can be attributed to angry parents and the presence of a simple illness. The word "dyscalculia" means difficulties in understanding examples, and learning the mathematical discipline.
Fact 3. Asthmatic!
There is a good explanation for why someone panics on a math exam. In English, the word "mathematics" is an anagram of the word "asthmatic". Recall that an anagram is a literary device, the meaning of which is in the rearrangement of the letters of the word, which results in another word, for example: Mathematics - asthmatic - me asthmatic '.
Fact 4. Too expensive divide-by-zero error
In 1997, on a US Navy warship, the Smart Ship program crashed as a result of division by zero (incorrect data entry, to be exact), which disabled all instruments on board the USS Yorktown. This incident at that time eclipsed all the interesting facts from the history of mathematics.
Fact 5. The issue price is a million
One of the most interesting facts about mathematics is that it still has many unanswered questions. The renowned Mathematical Institute is offering $1,000,000 to anyone who can solve any of these seven unsolved problems in mathematics:
- Hodge conjecture
- Poincare conjecture
- Riemann hypothesis
- Yang-Mills hypothesis
- Navier-Stokes equations: existence and smoothness
- Swinnerton-Dyer hypothesis
- G compared to the problem of emergency
If one of you finds a solution to at least one mathematical problem, then the Nobel Prize in mathematics is guaranteed to you!
Fact 6. Record
On World Math Day 2010, 1.13 million students from over 235 countries set a record by answering 479,732,613 questions correctly.
Fact 7. Death is like mathematics.
Abraham de Moivre, an English mathematician, discovered an amazing property of his sleep in old age. As it turned out, each time the duration of his sleep increased by exactly 15 minutes. The scientist even calculated the day when his sleep should last 24 hours. It is about November 27, 1754. On that day, Abraham de Moivre died
Fact 8. “Jewish” plus
Most Jews avoid the symbolic sign of the cross for Christianity. Therefore, in some Jewish schools, in mathematics lessons, instead of plus, children write a sign that looks like an inverted letter “t”.
