Here are some interesting maths facts and images courtesy of
buzzfeed. Click on the link to see all of them.
A French word for pie chart is “camembert”
The spiral shapes of sunflowers follow a Fibonacci sequence
That’s where you add the two preceding numbers in the sequence to give you the next one. So it starts 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. The Fibonacci sequence shows up in nature a fair bit.
A pizza that has radius “z” and height “a” has volume Pi × z × z × a.
Because the area of a circle is Pi multiplied by the radius squared (which can be written out as Pi × z × z). Then you multiply by the height to get the total volume.
The word hundred is derived from the word “hundrath”, which actually means 120 and not 100
Hundrath is Old Norse.
111,111,111 × 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
It also works for smaller numbers: 111 × 111 = 12321.
In a room of just 23 people there’s a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday.
It’s called the Birthday Problem. In a room of 75 there’s a 99% chance of two people matching.
7 is “arithmetically unique”
It’s the only number below 10 you can’t multiply or divide and keep within group. For example, 5 you can multiply by 2 to get 10 (still within the 1-10 group), 6 and 8 you can divide by 2.
7 also shows up a lot in human culture
We have seven deadly sins, and seven wonders of the world. Not to mention colours of the rainbow, pillars of wisdom, seas, dwarves, days in the week…
This might be because when these things came about there were celestial bodies visible in the sky (the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn).
The number 4 is considered unlucky in much of Asia.
That’s because the words for “four” in Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin and Korean (shi, sei, si, sa) sound the same as the words in those languages for death.
10! seconds is exactly 6 weeks
10! means 10 factorial. 10! = 10 × 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 3628800 seconds. Which is 42 days, or 6 weeks, exactly.
555 is used by some in Thailand as slang for “hahaha”, because the word for “five” is pronounced “ha”
