Useless Facts on Math And Numericals
If at the birth of Christ someone began to spend a dollar every second and continued spending up to the present time, that person would have spent less than $70 billion.
If you are thirty-five years old, you have lived approximately 12,800 days. If you are fifty you have lived 18,300 days. If sixty, 21,900 days; if seventy-five, 27,400.
George Parker Bidder, builder of London's Victoria docks in the nineteenth century, could figure problems like “How many times does 15,228 go into the cute of a 36” in four seconds. Bidder's brother memorized the entire Bible and could remember every date he ever read. George Bidder's eldest son, George Bidder Jr., was able to multiply a fifteen-digit number by another fifteen-digit number mentally in less than a minute.
The babylonians developed a series of advanced quadratic equations centuries before the birth of Christ.
When one adds up the number of letters in the names of the playing cards—ace (3), two (3), three (5), four (4), five (4), six (3), seven (5), eight (5), nine (4), ten (3), jack (4), queen (5), king (4)--the total comes to 52, the precise number of cards in a deck.
According to modern theories of higher mathematics:
- If a person approached the speed of light he would start moving backward in time.
- The shortest distance between two points is a curve, not a line.
- Parallel lines eventually meet.
- Time is a curve.
- Space is, paradoxically, at the same time both infinite and bounded.
- There is no such thing as a straight line in the universe.
- The faster an object moves in space the heavier it becomes—but at the same time, the smaller it becomes as well.
If one started counting the moment he or she was born and continued counting without stopping until he or she reached the age of sixty-five, that person still would not have counted to a billion.
If a person places a single coin on the first square of a chessboard, then places twice this number, or two coins, on the second square, twice this number again, or four coins, on the third, and so on until all sixty-four squares are covered, exactly 18,446,744,973,709,551,661 coins will be required to do the job—more than have been minted in the world since the beginning of recorded civilization.
If one counted twenty-four hours a day, it would take 31,688 years to count to a trillion. If a trillion dollar bills were stacked one on top of the other , the stack would be twice as high as Mount Everest. A trillion dollar bills laid end to end would circle the world 3,882 times.
Oscar Verhaeghe of Uccle, Belgium, can multiply four-digit numbers by two-digit numbers in fifteen seconds without pencil and paper. Verhaeghe can give square roots, cube enormous numbers, and square large sums in less than half a minute. Once, under test conditions, he calculated the square of 888,888,888,888,888 in forty seconds (the answer is 790,123,426,790,121,876,543,209,876,544). Except for his mathematical ability, Verhaeghe had the mental capacity of a child.