Pop Quiz

When calculating prodigy Truman Henry Safford was 10 years old, the Rev. H.W. Adams asked him to square the number 365,365,365,365,365,365 in his head. Dr. Adams wrote:

He flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes smiling and talking, and then seeming to be in agony, until in not more than a minute said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,225!

Safford (1836-1901) went to Harvard and became director of the Hopkins Observatory at Williams College. Strangely, his calculating abilities seemed to wane as he got older.

| Oddities · Science & Math

Euler’s Identity

You know these numbers:

constants

On the surface they appear unrelated. e is the base of natural logarithms, i is imaginary, π concerns circles. But, amazingly:

Euler's identity

Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce told a class, “It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.”

| Science & Math

Audition

In 2004 a mysterious billboard appeared in Silicon Valley; Cambridge, Mass.; Seattle; and Austin, Texas. It read:

{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com

Most people know that e (2.718281828 …) is the base of natural logarithms, but searching it for a 10-digit prime string is a considerable task — the first such string, 7427466391, starts at the 101st digit.

Solvers who went to http://7427466391.com found an even more difficult problem to solve. But solving that led them to a page at Google Labs … inviting them to submit a resume.

| Science & Math