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Tagged with “simon singh” (32) activity chart

  1. 1729 — The First Taxicab Number

    Episode five of A Further Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    Curious properties sometimes lurk within seemingly undistinguished numbers. 1729 sparked one of maths most famous anecdotes: a young Indian, Srinivasa Ramanujan, lay dying of TB in a London hospital. G.H. Hardy, the leading mathematician in England, visited him there. "I came over in cab number 1729," Hardy told Ramanujan. "That seems a rather dull number to me."

    "Oh, no!" Ramanujan exclaimed. "1729 is the smallest number you can write as the sum of two cubes, in two different ways." Most of us would use a computer to figure out that 1³ 12³ = 9³ 10³ = 1729. Ramanujan did it from his sickbed without blinking.

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    —Huffduffed by matthewmcg 3 months ago

  2. 6.67 x 10^-11 – The Number That Defines the Universe.

    Episode four of A Further Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    Newton’s equation of gravity included a number G, which indicates the strength of gravitation. It took 100 years before the shy Englishman Henry Cavendish (he left notes for his maids because he was too shy to talk to women) measured G to be 6.67 x 10^-11 Nm²/Kg². It allowed him to weigh the Earth itself. There has been an ever-greater desire to measure this number with accuracy, which even implied an antigravity at times. How did we measure this tiny number and what does it mean for the universe? The Astronomer Royal Martin Rees explains that a large value for G would mean that stars would burn too quickly and a low value would mean that the stars would not form in the first place, so is G perfectly tuned for life? Is God a mathematician?

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    —Huffduffed by Torvald 5 months ago

  3. 1 — The Most Popular Number

    Episode one of A Further Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    Literally, the most popular number, as it appears more often than any other number. More specifically, the first digit of all numbers is a 1 about 30% of the time, whereas it is 9 just 4% of time. This was accidentally discovered by the engineer Frank Benford. It works for all numbers – mountain heights, river lengths, populations, etc.

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    —Huffduffed by Torvald 5 months ago

  4. The Infinite Monkey Cage: Six Degrees of Separation?

    Robin Ince and Brian Cox are joined by Stephen Fry, Simon Singh and Aleks Krotoski to discuss the maths behind 6 degrees of separation and whether there is something special about Kevin Bacon that seems to make him so well connected?

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/timc

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    —Huffduffed by jonathandeamer one year ago

  5. Strange Quarks: Series 1, Episode 1

    The very first episode of Strange Quarks is out! Simon Singh talks to us about libel reform, skepticism, alternative medicine, and his appearance in Robin Ince’s "Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People" this year; while Simon Perry explains how he’s been using regulation to make life difficult for quacks. This week’s guest report is by Dr*T.

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    —Huffduffed by halazoon 2 years ago

  6. 6 Degrees of Separation

    Episode three of A Further Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    Six is often treated as 2x3, but has many characteristics of its own. Six is also the "pivot" of its divisors (1 2 3=6=1x2x3) and also the centre of the first five even numbers: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. Six seems to have a pivoting action both mathematically and socially. How is it that everyone in the world can be linked through just six social ties? As Simon discovers, the concept of “six degrees of separation” emerged from a huge postal experiment conducted by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1967. Milgram asked volunteers to send a package by mail to one of a hundred people chosen at random. But they could only send mail to people they knew on first name terms.

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    —Huffduffed by srushe 3 years ago

  7. 2 — At The Double

    Episode two of A Further Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    We all remember the story of the Persian who invented chess and who asked to be paid with 1 grain of rice on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third and so on, doubling all the way to the 64th square. He bankrupted the state!

    This doubling is a form of exponential growth, which appears in everything from population growth to financial inflation to the inflation theory that supposedly caused the Big Bang.

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    —Huffduffed by srushe 3 years ago

  8. Another Five Numbers, 2: The Number Seven

    Episode two of Another Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    Picture a gambler. Is it George Clooney, tuxedo ruffled after an all-nighter at a Vegas Black Jack table, or your old Aunt Doris putting down her yearly quid-on-the-nose for the Grand National? Recent research would suggest that it’s neither. Your inveterate gambler is far more likely to be sporting leather patches at their elbows, an unhealthy appetite for corduroy, and a penchant for M-Series rather than Martinis, shaken or stirred. Some mathematicians are putting their mathematical theory where their mouth is and are betting the shirts, stuffed or otherwise, off their backs.

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    —Huffduffed by liqweed 3 years ago

  9. The Imaginary Number

    Episode four of Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    The imaginary number takes mathematics to another dimension. It was discovered in sixteenth century Italy at a time when being a mathematician was akin to being a modern day rock star, when there was ‘nuff respect’ to be had from solving a particularly ‘wicked’ equation. And the wicked equation of the day went like this: "If the square root of 1 is both 1 and -1, then what is the square root of -1?"

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    —Huffduffed by srushe 3 years ago

  10. The Golden Ratio

    Episode three of Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    Divide any number in the Fibonacci sequence by the one before it, for example 55/34, or 21/13, and the answer is always close to 1.61803. This is known as the Golden Ratio, and hence Fibonacci’s Sequence is also called the Golden Sequence. Unlikely though it might seem, this series of numbers is the common factor linking rabbits, cauliflowers and snails.

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    —Huffduffed by srushe 3 years ago

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