Maths, but not as you know it…
Perfect numbers and Mersenne primes might seem like unrelated branches of math, but work by Euclid and Euler over 2000 years apart showed they are so deeply connected that a one-to-one correspondence exists between the two sets of numbers.
Produced by Tom Rocks Maths intern Kai Laddiman, with assistance from Tom Crawford. Thanks to St John’s College, Oxford for funding the placement.
Fun facts about numbers that you didn’t realise you’ve secretly always wanted to know…
22 – TWENTY-TWO
Coming in hot, 22 happens to be one of my favourite numbers – if you divide it by 7 you get about 3.142, which is a handy way of getting close to pi without having to remember all the digits! Then of course there’s Joseph Heller’s famous novel Catch-22. In the book, Catch-22 is the Air Force policy which says that bomber pilots can only stop flying planes if they are declared insane. But like the name suggests, there’s a catch. Catch-22 says that asking for a mental evaluation to get declared insane is proof that you aren’t in fact insane. So technically, there’s a way to get out of flying more bombing runs… but if you try it, you get sent right back out in the next plane!
Twenty-two also pops up in the kitchen. Normally, if you are slicing a pizza using 6 cuts, you’d do it neatly and end up with 12 even slices – much like the numbers on a clock face. But if you were a lazy pizza chef and just sliced randomly, you could end up cutting slices in half and ending up with more pieces. And it turns out, the most pieces you can end up with after 6 cuts is, you guessed it, 22!
On a darker note, 22 was also the lucky number of the Haitian voodoo dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Papa Doc started studying voodoo folklore to spread rumours that he had supernatural powers, which let him rule through fear. But eventually, he started believing the rumours himself. He would only go outside his palace on the 22nd of the month, because he thought he was guarded by voodoo spirits on that lucky day. He even claimed to have killed JFK, whose assassination was on the 22nd of November 1963, supposedly by stabbing a voodoo doll of him 2222 times that morning…
23 – TWENTY-THREE
For 23 we’re going back to maths, and specifically prime numbers. A prime number remember, is one that can only be divided by itself and one without giving any remainder. Twenty-three has the unique property of being the smallest prime number which is not a ‘twin prime’ – that is a prime number which does not have another one within two spaces of it on the number-line. For example, 3, 5 and 7 are all close friends, while 11 and 13 go together. 17 is next to 19, but the nearest prime number to 23 is either four places below at 19, or six places above at 29, making it the smallest prime number to not have the ‘twin’ property.
Twenty-three is also big for birthdays. Not because the age of 23 is particularly special (although being the age mentioned in my favourite song – Blink 182’s ‘what’s my age again?’ – I do have a soft spot for it), but because of its appearance in the ‘Birthday Paradox’. The complete explanation is a little too long for Funbers, but in short it says that if you choose 23 people at random and put them in a room together, there is a greater than 50% chance that 2 of them share the same birthday. If that sounds too crazy to believe, check out a full explanation here from one of my students who applied it to the 23-man England squad for the 2018 Football World Cup. Now to enjoy some classic pop punk: “Nobody likes you when you’re 23…”
24 – TWENTY-FOUR
Who remembers Avogadro’s constant for the number of atoms contained in one mole of a substance from high school Chemistry? No, me neither. But, a great way to approximate it is using 24 factorial – or 24! in mathematical notation. The factorial function (or exclamation mark) tells you to multiply all of the numbers less than 24 together. So, 24! is equal to 24 x 23 x 22 x 21 x 20 x 19 x … x 2 x 1, also known as an incredibly large number. It’s about 3% larger than Avogadro’s constant, but certainly easier than remembering 6.02214076 x 1023.
Twenty-four also represents the number of carats in pure gold, the number of letters in the Greek alphabet (ancient and modern) and the number of points on a backgammon board. Mathematically, 24 is the smallest number with exactly 8 numbers that divide it – can you name them? And, it’s equal to exactly 4 factorial: 4! = 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24. Last but not least, where would we be without the 24 hour day – or to be precise 24 hours plus or minus a few milliseconds to be completely exact…
| Day length | |
| Yesterday | 24 hours -0.46 ms |
| Today | 24 hours -0.39 ms |
| Tomorrow | 24 hours -0.35 ms |
| Shortest 2019 | 24 hours -0.95 ms |
| Longest 2019 | 24 hours +1.67 ms |
| Last Year Average | 24 hours +0.69 ms |
Next month (March 2019) I will be hosting the ‘Carnival of Mathematics’ – a monthly blogging round up hosted by a different blog each month and organised by the Aperiodical.
The Carnival of Mathematics accepts any mathematics-related blog posts, YouTube videos or other online content posted during the previous month (February 2019): explanations of serious mathematics, puzzles, writing about mathematics education, mathematical anecdotes, refutations of bad mathematics, applications, reviews, etc. Sufficiently mathematized portions of other disciplines are also acceptable. Links to the previous monthly posts and a FAQ section can be found on the Aperiodical website here.
The deadline to submit your posts will be the 1st March 2019.
This incarnation will be the 167th Carnival of Mathematics so here are some fun facts about the number 167…
The previous Carnival can be found at Math with Bad Drawings hosted by Ben.
My favourite Carnival is number 146 which featured Tom Rocks Maths for the first time!
Often in Mathematics problems that are easy to state turn out to be extremely difficult to solve. Two hundred and seventy-five years ago, Goldbach wrote a letter to the famous Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in which he wrote the simple statement:
“Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.”
Just in case you are not up to speed with your maths (and let’s face it why would you be if you’re not a mathematician), let’s break this statement down. The even integers are the numbers divisible by two: 2, 4, 6, 8, …, 256, … and so on. The prime numbers are the ones that can only be obtained by multiplying one by themselves. For example, 3 and 5 are prime numbers because 3=1×3 and 5=1×5 and they have no other representations as a product of two numbers. However, 6 for instance is not prime because 6=1×6=2×3. In fact, all even integers, greater than 2 that were mentioned above, are not primes because they are all divisible by 2 and therefore can be represented as a product of two numbers in at least two ways: 4=1×4=2×2, 6=1×6=2×3, 8=1×8=2×4 etc.
And so, to Goldbach’s conjecture. It says that all even numbers: 4, 6, 8, 10, … can be written as a sum of two primes. Let’s see a couple of examples:
4=2+2
6=3+3
8=3+5
10=3+7
12=5+7
….
A nice way to represent the conjecture visually is through a “pyramid” and because we all love pretty pictures let’s see how this magic happens.
First, we write all of the prime numbers on two of the sides of a triangle as below: 2, 3, 5, 7 etc. We then draw a line leaving each prime number which is parallel to the opposite side of the triangle (stick with me), and finally at the points of intersection of these lines, we write the sum of the numbers. It sounds more complicated than it is as you’ll see with the following example. In the picture below, take the blue line coming out of the number 7 on the left and the red line coming out from the number 11 on the right. They intersect at 18 because 11+7=18. This means that the even integer 18 can be represented as a sum of the two prime numbers 11 and 7. If you look at the intersections of all of the red and blue lines in the pyramid, you’ll see that we actually get all of the even numbers. In other words, any even integer can be written as the sum of two prime numbers, and we can see what those two numbers are by finding the corresponding intersection on our diagram. This is Goldbach’s Conjecture.
It is not very difficult to show that a small even number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers – either by finding the corresponding point on the picture or by trying all of the possibilities. Let’s take 96. We start by checking the smallest prime number 3. 96=3+93, but 93 is not a prime, because 93=1×93=3×31. We continue with the next prime – 5. 96=5+91, which again doesn’t work because 91=1×91=7×13. Next, we try with 7: 96=7+89. Since 89 is a prime, we have obtained a representation of the number 96 as a sum of two primes.
We were able to quickly check whether 96 satisfies Goldbach’s conjecture because the number is relatively small. It becomes much harder to make these checks for larger numbers. It’s been verified with the use of a computer that the conjecture is true for numbers as big as 4×1018 and this is why the conjecture is believed to be true, but we do not yet have a formal mathematical proof. And being mathematicians, we cannot say something is true until we can prove it.
There have of course been many efforts over the last 275 years to try to prove the conjecture, most of which followed one of two routes. Either by proving that all even integers can be represented as a sum of some number of primes – as a sum of 6 primes (1995, Ramare) and as a sum of 4 primes (Herald Helfgott) – or by proving that almost all even integers can be written as a sum of 2 primes. But, as of yet, the secret formula required to unlock the proof of Goldbach’s Conjecture remains elusive.
You may be wondering why on earth mathematicians are spending their time and effort to prove this seemingly random result about prime numbers? Is it really that important? Whilst you may have a valid point about the applications of this particular conjecture, the value in proving such a result is not in the statement itself, but rather in the new methods, theories and techniques that will need to be developed to solve the problem. So, in 20, 10 or even 2 years from now when you hear that Goldbach’s conjecture has been proved, you should be happy not because we now know for sure that it’s true, but rather because some incredible new area of mathematics has been developed in the process. And who knows, this new area of maths may even pose a new, even more complicated conjecture that will occupy mathematicians for the next 275 years…
Mariya Delyakova
