1, because come on.
4, because that number just seemed to follow me around from the beginning. For example, when I was four years old, I lived in the city’s fourth district, door number 4 of our street, on the fourth floor.
10, because I love a good Top 10, rating things from 1 to 10, etc.
42, because of Douglas Adams.
69, because come on.
451, indirectly because of Fahrenheit 451, but really because that’s the door code for the first door in most “immersive sim” games in the Looking Glass tradition.
Correct, it’s a Lucasfilm thing. The number appears e.g. in most LucasArts adventure games as an easter egg.
It’s an extract from a book rather than something I wrote. That example, along with others, is mentioned on the wiki page, though I’m sure even that’s not exhaustive!
Would counting 69,105 leaves count as both superhuman and super computational considering that Zork was released the year before the 8086 ushered in 16-bit computing and over a decade before the 386 became the first commercially available 32-bit processor and 69,105 overflowing a 16-bit unsigned integer?
Hmmm… Now, there’s a controversial one for the OEIS, the most interesting n-bit integers, where an n-bit integer is an integer that can be expressed with n bits but not with n-1 bits. I mean 0 or 1 for the 1-bit entry and 2 or 3 for the 2-bit entry is already a very hard call, and 4, 5, 6, and 7 for the title of most interesting 3-bit number ain’t easy, and while numbers that stand out to humans get rarer the larger they get, we also double the number of candidates at each step in the sequence.
Also, I now wonder if the sequence starting 1, 5, 22, 108 is in the OEIS… Checks the OEIS. The Answer would appear to be no. And if I’m mathing right, the next few terms would be 392 and 1552.
As for nnn, isn’t it also an NSFW onomatopoeia? Though honestly, I think just about any acronym/initialism could be given an NSFW expansion if you try hard enough.
Also, I’ve stumbled on Number Gossip before, but had forgotten about it and only checked out a handful of numbers in the past… now, I’ve decided I’m going to try reading the whole thing and am currently up to 18. Admittedly, I’m mostly skimming the rare and common sections of each page as it’s the unique properties I care about most.
Edit: Now up to 38, though I might take a break from Number Gossip to get through the backlog of external links I’ve amassed from 1-37.
Also, something I find funny:
6 is a perfect number in maths, yet is the number of imperfection in Christian Numerology, being one less than 7, the number of perfection. Also, 13 is an unlucky number in superstition, but a lucky number in maths. Also, 7 is the most common roll when summing 2d6(wonder if that plays into it’s Lucky 7 reputation) and 13 is the most common result of summing 2d12.
Also, I have a new favorite integer sequence: The Happy go Lucky Primes, that is primes that are both lucky and happy.
I confess, reading Number Gossip, I became intrigued by the Happy and Lucky properties, so I googled the sequences and their prime subsets, then typed the first few primes that are both into OEIS’s search box and the Happy go Lucky Primes dropped out.
Never really been able to make sense of OEIS’s entries beyond the short description at the top and the sequence itself(I think it’s a mix of some of the extra info being really technical and math notation not being very screen reader friendly in a lot of cases), so I don’t know much beyond that.
Also, not prime, but 49 is happy-go-lucky, adding to my like of it.
Edit: up to 152 on Number Gossip… and forgot to mention, but I’m also fond of 151 because Mew is my favorite Pokemon and Mew’s Kanto/National Pokedex number is 151… also 251 because I also like Celebi.
The more interesting result might be that 33 squared is the reverse of 99 squared as reversible squares having reversible roots seems to be the norm for such squares.
This only happens if there is no carry in the left-most digit when computing the square, it’s easy to convince oneself just thinking about it a bit. The integers that have this property are called skinny numbers, listed in OEIS A061909.
Regarding Hanon’s sardonic quote excerpt that started this thread, “What is your favorite number, and why is it 8?”: while I don’t think I’ve ever called 8 my favorite number, I present to you one of the reasons why I grew to love 8. From the demo of The Stanley Parable (the original version):
Never fails to bring a smile and some hearty laughs.
I think I’ve read it, too (but in a German translation). And, yeah, I enjoyed it, too. The topic is interesting (for number nerds) and Singh tells his story very fascinatingly.
Edit: As I already did elsewhere in this forum, I recommend the book about encryption by the same author.
i have always enjoyed the number 5! i remember learning how to write it in school as “a hat and a bat and a big fat belly” (to describe the top bar, the horizontal bar, and the curve at the bottom of the shape) and that really pleased me.
Me too! Actually, first I came upon the BBC Horizon documentary accompanying the book. When I found the book later in a second hand bookshop, I was elated with the amount of history and background it provided for the narrower focus in the documentary.
