Choose four distinct digits and arrange them into the largest and smallest numbers possible (e.g., 9751 and 1579). Subtract the smaller from the larger to produce a new number (9751 – 1579 = 8172) and repeat the operation.
Within seven iterations you’ll always arrive at 6174.
With three-digit numbers you’ll aways arrive at 495.
The border between Delaware and Pennsylvania is a perfect curve.
It’s the arc of a circle centered on the cupola of the courthouse at New Castle.
It’s the only such boundary in the territorial United States.
“We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Someone once asked Jean Cocteau, “Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?”
Cocteau considered, then said, “I would take the fire.”
Finland’s national painting is Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel.
Simberg refused to explain its meaning … but it was his favorite work.
‘Did you hear the story of the extraordinary precocity of Mrs. Perkins’s baby that died last week?’ asked Mrs. Allgood. ‘It was only three months old, and lying at the point of death, when the grief-stricken mother asked the doctor if nothing could save it. “Absolutely nothing!” said the doctor. Then the infant looked up pitifully into its mother’s face and said—absolutely nothing!’
‘Impossible!’ insisted Mildred. ‘And only three months old!’
— Henry Ernest Dudeney, Amusements in Mathematics, 1917
James McNeill Whistler failed his West Point chemistry exam.
“If silicon had been a gas,” he said later, “I should have been a major general.”
In this sentence there are sixteen words, eighty-one letters, one hyphen, four commas, and one period.
A “decalogue of canons for observation in practical life,” sent by Thomas Jefferson to the new father of a baby boy:
It’s not clear what a smooth handle is. Possibly it refers to a saying by Epictetus: “Everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne, another by which it cannot.” Or possibly Jefferson was referring to the need for civil discourse.
See also Ben Franklin’s “13 virtues” and Poor Richard’s lesser-known maxims.
