Search This Blog

Tuesday 18 October 2016

Number

HISTORY

Pythagoras and his followers considered 10 the most sacred number, as 10 = 1+2+3+4, which represented existence (1), creation (2), life (3) and the four elements, earth, air, fire and water (4).

The ancient Greeks did not consider One to be a number at all. A number, said Euclid, is an “aggregate of units”, so numbers began at Two.

In 500 AD some Indian mathematicians suggest the use of the symbol "0" meaning zero or nothing.


By 810 the Arabs had established the modern system of numerals which we use today. They'd picked it up around 750 from Hindus, who had invented it some 150 years earlier.

Westerners call our numbers "Arabic," because the notation system came to Europe via Islamic Arab mathematicians. The first written record of Arabic numbers in the West is a Spanish codex from 976.

Adoption of the Arabic numeric system crept along among the educated elite until the fourteenth century, when Italian merchants finally ditched their Roman I's and V's. Other traders wisely followed suit.


The Cistercian numerals are a forgotten number system, developed by the Cistercian monastic order in the early thirteenth century, much more compact than Arabic or Roman numerals: with a single character you could write any integer from 1 to 9999.

Although mathematicians have used zero since at least the 8th century, the word 'zero' was first recorded in English only in 1604.

American Jeremy Harper counted aloud every number up to a million, live on the Internet. He spoke for 16 hours a day, completing the marathon after 89 days on September 14, 2007.  Harper did not leave his apartment or shave until he finished.


NUMBERS AND WORDS

Until the 19th century, a "long hundred" was still a term used to mean 120, especially in the measurement of numbers of fish sold.

The word “twelve” is from the old English twelf, literally “two left” (over 10).

After a million comes--- billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion, and undecillion.

In English, every number shares at least one letter with the numbers immediately before and after: One shares an 'O' with Two, which shares a 'T' with Three.

Every odd number that exists has the letter "e" in it.

If you were to spell out numbers from one, you would not find the letter 'A' until you reach 'One Thousand'.


Forty is the only number which when spelled out in English has its letters in alphabetical order.

Four is the only number that has the same amount of letters as its actual value.

The highest number that can be spelled out without using any letter more than once is five thousand.
The next highest is eighty-four.

NUMBERS IN OTHER CULTURES

In China, 13 is considered to be among the luckiest of numbers and people often pay huge amounts for items that contain it.

The Andamanese language has only two words for numbers: they mean 'one' and 'more than one'.

In Old Norse, the word hundrad, from which our 'hundred' derives, originally meant 120.

In Thai, the number 5 is pronounced "ha" -- so instead of saying "hahahahaha," Thai speakers will sometimes write "55555."

FUN WITH NUMBERS

2006 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

Multiply 37,037 by any single number (1-9), then multiply that number by 3. Every digit in the answer will be the same as that first single number.

The smallest number that can be divided exactly by each of the numbers between one and 10 is 2,520.


1 divided by 998001 gives a complete sequence from 000 to 999 in order.

If you multiply a number with 9, and add all the digits of the resulting number, the sum would always come out to be 9.

PERFECT NUMBER

A perfect number in mathematics is an integer that is equal to the sum of the smaller numbers that divide it exactly. So 6 (=3+2+1) and 28 (=14+7+4+2+1) are perfect.

After 6 and 28, the next three perfect numbers are 496 and 8,128 and 33,550,336.

Nobody knows if there are any odd numbers that are perfect.

The ancient Greeks also thought six perfect as a man's height was six times his foot length. Plato considered the number 10 to be perfect, as there are 10 fingers on both hands and 10 toes.

Sources Christianitytoday.com, Daily Mail, Daily Express

No comments:

Post a Comment