Sunday, February 27, 2005

Prime names

If you turn all the letters in the following names into a number (a=1, b=2, z=26, etc) and then add them together, you get prime numbers: Scooby Doo, Jesus Christ, Sherlock Holmes. I found that out from the book "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time". It is narrated by a boy with Asperger's Syndrome. He makes a great narrator because he is freakishly observant--tiny details about people's shoes, their voices, smells, etc. He also explains a really interesting maths puzzle called The Monty Hall Problem and the history of how when it was published in a magazine thousands of maths professors wrote in and said it was wrong (even thought it wasn't) because it is so uncomfortably unintuitive. The book is set in Swindon and it still managed to make me homesick for the UK. No offence oh Swindonites but when tales of Swindon can make me homesick, it's a sign I need to go home.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

saying "maths" instead of "math" is also a sign you need to go home.

sorry we missed you while you were out west. hope you and tom had fun.

1:03 PM  

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