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Saturday, June 23, 2007

Some useless facts

The word "queue" is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.

Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been tasted by archaeologists and found edible.

Coca-Cola would be green if colouring weren’t added to it.

In 1386, a pig in France was executed by public hanging for the murder of a child

A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off!

Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.

You can't kill yourself by holding your breath

Earth is the only planet not named after a god.

You're born with 300 bones, but by the time you become an adult, you only have 206.

Dolphins sleep with one eye open!

The first known transfusion of blood was performed as early as 1667, when Jean-Baptiste, transfused two pints of blood from a sheep to a young man

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

The number 1729 (called Hardy Ramanujam number)

Why is the number 1729 famous ? Well, it all started from around a century back. There were these 2 famous mathematicians, G Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujam (who was entirely untrained, but a remarkable mathematician) who were sitting in a hospital room (Hardy had come to visit Ramanujam).
Ramanujam asked Hardy about the taxi number that he came in, and Hardy mentioned 1729, calling it a boring number. Ramanujam disputed that,calling 1729 as a very interesting number, it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
Which are the 2 ways?
10X10X10 + 9X9X9 = 1729
12X12X12 + 1X1X1 = 1729
There are no other numbers smaller than this which is the sum of 2 cubes.

Monday, June 4, 2007

The mysterious number 6174

I was roaming around the web, when I saw this particular web page, explaining the mystery of the number 6174. Read it to the end, and you will feel happy that you learnt something new.
So what's the mystery of the number 6174? Well, it's sort of like a mathematical puzzle. You need to do the following steps:
1. Take any 4 digit number where all 4 digits are not the same (so you can't select 9999), so for example, take 3456
2. Rearrange the digits to get the largest and smallest number: so you get 3456 and 6543
3. Subtract them, so you get 6543-3456 = 3087
4. Do this again with the resultant number, so you get 8730 - 378 = 8352
5. Again repeat 4, so you get 6174
6. Do it again, 7641-1467 = 6174
The number repeated itself, and will do so again and again, no matter which 4 digit number you take.
For 3 digits number, you get 495