(√5 + 1)/2
This number is called the “Golden Ratio”, or the “Divine Proportion”. The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers has 4 ½ pages dedicated to this number. It’s really popular among mathematicians, but artists also find it interesting and very useful.
What’s a Googol?
These days, “Google” is a well-known search engine on the Internet. The name “Google” is a play on the word Googol*, which is the name for a number written as 1 followed by 100 zeros!
It looks like this:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
It’s easy to write it out; doesn’t take long at all. But if you [...]
The History of Nothing
Imagine if there were no number “zero”. How would you know whether “23″ meant “23″ or “203″ or “230″? Or even “2030000″? The number and the character that we know as zero hasn’t been around forever. The Babylonians, in the 2nd century BC, used to use a pair of “wedges” to indicate an empty space, [...]
The Silver Abacus
I don’t actually use an abacus to teach maths; I barely know how to use one myself, although I’ve said for ages that I’d like to learn. The slogan on this Web site: “Maths the Way Nature Intended” is just a bit of fun. I have no idea where the idea for that tag line [...]