Wednesday, September 10, 2008

My Uninteresting Numbers?

Some of you may remember a recurring conversation I have about "interesting numbers." The challenge is to think of something interesting about every counting number (basically I start with 0 and count my way up, in integers, and try to think of something interesting about every number along the way).

There's a paradoxical proof that there are no uninteresting numbers. If there WERE, there would be a LOWEST uninteresting number, which would be quite interesting (I assume I don't need to explain how that iterates into the proof).

Then you could also have a least interesting number, or a most interesting uninteresting number (something that's close but doesn't cross the threshold--something like "almost prime" or "if you turn it upside down and add a letter it spells something").

Anyway, some proud nerd or nerds at Stetson University have compiled a list of interesting counting numbers, though they've missed a few, up to 9999. I think some of my facts are a lot more interesting than theirs (some of theirs aren't that interesting, like "X has an Nth root that starts with y.zzzzz"), but they've got quite a few thousand numerical tidbits (1 per number) and while I may have several per number, I stopped working on the problem in the 120s.

Anyway, without further ado, here's the list: http://www.stetson.edu/~efriedma/numbers.html

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