A fascination with numbers
Ok, I’ll admit it, I’m not always good with numbers, and yet I have always been fascinated by them. In grade four I didn’t know how to do long division, and so copied from a friend sitting next to me as I slowly deciphered the process on my own. Yet paradoxicaly I was a member of the math club and I came in second place within my school board for the big math competition. The guy I copied long divisions from came in first.
The rest of my academic life my math marks varied from a record high 100% three semesters in a row to a record low 16% precalculus class in college, but even then I never hated math itself (let us blame the teacher and the newfound freedoms of college life). If you would like to test the waters to see if you share my interest for math I present to you the following articles, all of which I promise will contain hardly any equations at all. We’ll start with a popular teaser known as The Birthday Paradox. If you liked that one, then check out Benford’s Law (or looking out for Number One), which shows how popular the number one really is, and how easy it can be to find fake data. The longest, and also the most interesting article is Who Can Name the Biggest Number which is a fascinating look at the origin, use and limitations of really big numbers. Finally, for a bit of eye candy, check out The Secret Lives of Numbers and more importantly the visualisation on the left of that page, which in my opinion is one of the nicest Java Applets to have been implemented.
