Here's some strange facts about maths
- The word “hundred” comes from the old Norse term, “hundrath”, which actually means 120 and not 100.
- In a room of 23 people there’s a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday.
- Most mathematical symbols weren’t invented until the 16th century. Before that, equations were written in words.
- “Forty” is the only number that is spelt with letters arranged in alphabetical order.
- Conversely, “one” is the only number that is spelt with letters arranged in descending order.
- From 0 to 1000, the only number that has the letter “a” in it is “one thousand”.
- ‘Four’ is the only number in the English language that is spelt with the same number of letters as the number itself.
- Every odd number has an “e” in it.
- The reason Americans call mathematics “math”, is because they argue that “mathematics” functions as a singular noun so ‘math’ should be singular too.
- Markings on animal bones indicate that humans have been doing maths since around 30,000BC.
- “Eleven plus two” is an anagram of “twelve plus one” which is pretty fitting as the answer to both equations is 13.
- Also, there are 13 letters in both “eleven plus two” and “twelve plus one”.
- Zero is not represented in Roman numerals.
- The word “mathematics” only appears in one Shakespearean play, “The Taming of the Shrew”.
- -40 °C is equal to -40 °F.
- In France, a pie chart is sometimes referred to as a “camembert”.
- The symbol for division (i.e.÷) is called an obelus.
- 2 and 5 are the only prime numbers that end in 2 or 5.
- A ‘jiffy’ is an actual unit of time. It means 1/100th of a second.
- If you shuffle a deck of cards properly, it’s more than likely that the exact order of the cards you get has never been seen before in the whole history of the universe.
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