Math Fun Facts

Math Fun Facts

• 1. Did you know that putting on socks is actually an example of Commutative Property, as the order is unimportant!!!
• 2. Did you know fibonacci sequences are found in nature such as branching of trees, spirals of a sunflower and arrangements of pine cone.
• 3. Did you know there are many mnemonics to remember the value of pi. One such is "How I wish I could calculate pi". The number of letter in each word corresponds to the value.
• 4. Did you know the word Fraction comes from Latin which means "to break".
• 5. Did you know the circle has the shortest circumference among all the shapes with the same area.
• 6. Did you know compatible numbers, also known as friendly numbers, help us in mental arithmetic.
• 7. Did you know the name "Google" is actually a misspelling of the word googol, which is a large number. Googol is one followed by a hundred zeroes.
• 8. Did you know "Googolplex" is 1 followed by a googol zeroes. This number is so big that it can't be written because literally there is no room in the universe to fit it in.
• 9. Did you know that the Babylonians measured the circumference of a circle as approximately 3 times the diameter, which is close to today’s measurement using the value of Pi.
• 10. Did you know Indians are credited with the concept of Zero as a number and not merely a symbol or an empty space.
• 11. Did you know Archimedes of Syracuse played a large role in the history of geometry, his most important contribution was the method for determination of volumes of objects with irregular shapes.
• 12. Did you know the Equal sign "=" was invented by 16th Century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing "is equal to" in his equations.
• 13. Did you know Euclid's book, "The Elements" was used as a mathematics textbook for 2000 years and is still used as a basis for high school geometry.
• 14. Did you know that most Mathematical symbols weren't invented till 16th century. Prior to that Math equations were written in words, making it very time consuming.
• 15. Did you know the word 'hundred' is derived from the old Norse word "Hundrath" which actually means 120 and not 100.
• 16. Did you know notches on animal bones show that people have been doing mathematics, or at least making computations, since around 30,000BC.
• 17. Did you know ZERO is the only number which has so many names such as nought, naught, nil, zilch and zip.
• 18. Did you know the number 5 is pronounced as 'Ha' in Thai language and 555 is also used by some as slang for 'HaHaHa'.
• 19. Did you know a 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
• 20. Did you know among all shapes with the same perimeter a circle has the largest area.
• 21. DId you know the abacus is considered the origin of the calculator.
• 22. Did you know plus (+) and minus (-) sign symbols were used as early as 1489 A.D.
• 23. Did you know an icosagon is a shape with 20 sides.
• 24. Did you know that from 0 to 1,000, the letter "A" only appears in 1,000 ("one thousand").
• 25. Did you know that Greek mathematician Pythagoras used pebbles to represent numbers while solving mathematical equations. Hence the name Calculus was born, which means pebbles in Greek.
• 26. Did you know in 1995 in Taipei, citizens were allowed to remove ‘4’ from street numbers because it sounded like ‘death’ in Chinese.
• 27. Did you know 40 when written - "forty" is the only number with letters in alphabetical order, while "one" is the only one with letters in reverse order.
• 28. Do you know what comes after a million, billion and trillion? A quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion and undecillion.
• 29. Did you know that the name 'zero' derives from the Arabic word "sifr" which also gave us the English word 'cipher' meaning 'a secret way of writing' .
• 30. Did you know Zero (0) is the only number that cannot be represented by Roman numerals.
• 31. Did you know 2 and 5 are the only primes that end in 2 or 5.
• 32. Did you know "FOUR" is the only number in the English language that is spelt with the same number of letters as the number itself.
• 33. Have you ever noticed that the opposite sides a die always add up to seven (7).
• 34. Did you know a convex (outward) quadrilateral with one pair of parallel sides is known as a trapezoid in the US and a trapezium in other parts of the world. In both instances it comes from a Greek word meaning ‘a little table’.
• 35. Did you know Chinese mathematics developed around the 11th century BC and included important concepts related to negative numbers, decimals, algebra and geometry
• 36. Did you know the Greeks constructed aesthetically pleasing buildings like the Parthenon and artworks based on the golden ratio of approximately 1.618.
• 37. Did you know the multiplication tables were invented by the Babylonians, but the Egyptians developed and perfected them into a form that has remained unchanged and is still in use.
• 38. Did you know that in a room of just 23 people there is a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday.
• 39. Did you know that around 825 A.D. in Baghdad, Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizimi wrote a book called "Kitab al-jabrwa al-muqabalah" a major algebraic work of the period. The word "Algebra"comes from this title ("al-jabr").
• 40. Did you know Evariste Galois invented an entirely new branch of math called group theory when he was in his teens.
• 41. Did you know the Slide Rule is the mathematical instrument used for computing before the calculator was introduced in 1970.
• 42. 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.
• 43. Did you know there are 292 ways to make change for a dollar!!
• 44. f each count were a second long, it would take about 12 days to count to a million and about 32 years to count to a billion.
• 45. Did you know Augustus Ada KIng, Countess of Lovelace is world's first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace Day is celebrated every year in mid October.
• 46. Did you know that the unsolved theorem posed by Fermat in 1637 was finally proven in 1995 (358 years later) by a man named Andrew Wiles.
• 47. Did you know 12,345,678,987,654,321 is a product of 111,111,111 and 111,111,111.
• 48. Did you know 9,808,358 is the number of digits of the biggest prime number in the world. It is more than the total number of atoms existing in the universe.