You are about to read a special story problem, one I call a “mathematical fairy story” problem. You may find it a little hard at first, but that’s okay. If a story problem is easy for you to do, then it really isn’t a “problem” anymore, is it?” Piet Hein, a Danish mathematician, architect, poet, [...]
[Preface NOTE: The material presented below was lifted from an article I saw some time ago by Dan Brutlag, "Making Your Own Rules". THE MATHEMATICS TEACHER, November 1990. pp. 608-611. What is being given below is how I prepared a handout to give to my classes, mostly as anactivity for use by a substitute.] NUMBER [...]
I like to play chess on the internet. It is often the case that players are rated with numbers according to how well they perform. Recently I noticed an interesting bit of number trivia about my rating in a certain type of chess. It said that I had 1661 points! (Not bad, but not the [...]
For the present, this page is only meant to be a storage place for curious and odd facts that WTM has discovered while researching prime numbers and the prime factorizations of various composite numbers. The dates indicate when the item was submitted for posting in the website Prime Curios. 11: Begin with 11, and continually [...]
Background In the latter part of May of this year (2001) we discovered a very interesting website all about prime numbers, titled appropriately The Prime Pages. There is a companion page connected with it, called Prime Curios, a collection of clever and interesting trivia, moderated by G. L. Honaker, Jr. It is to this 2nd [...]
FATHER PRIMES A “father” prime shall be defined as one for which the sum of the squares of its digits is also a prime. The sum is therefore the “child” prime. Example: 23 is a “father” prime because 22 + 32 = 4 + 9 = 13. That is, 23 is the “father, (or progenitor)” [...]
Recently (June 2001) I became aware of an interesting website, dedicated to the discovery and reporting of appearances of the number 47 in our world. It is called, appropriately enough, the 47 Society. They post e-mail notes from the members about any trivia related to what they claim is the “quintessential random number”. Well, if [...]
To view the Prime Chart, click HERE. The concept of prime number is one that has fascinated mathematicians and frustrated students for a long time. It is one of the most fertile fields where one can make interesting discoveries on any level one wishes. By way of illustrating this, you only have to check out [...]
Preface: On this page I present a series of three handout sheets that I use in my Pre-algebra classes whose purpose is to teach how to find out if a large number is a prime or not. And by “large”, my main concern, as you will soon see, are numbers greater than 100 and less than 10,000. [...]
HOW ABOUT SEXY NUMBERS! Before you begin to think that this page of WTM is going to be “x-rated”, we urge you to put that thought out of your mind right now. You see, we have merely created a new category for classifying numbers. (We assure you that we’re not going to talk about boy-numbers [...]