My number is up
I’m lucky.
I don’t suffer from arithmophobia. If I did, it would have made my job as a computer programmer somewhat awkward.
However, a headline caught my eye yesterday that caused my heart to flutter a bit and I confess to just a little twinge of anxiety –
Now the vast majority of numbers cause me little or no bother. But there are a few that I find distinctly unnerving. Take 13,587,997 for example. That’s a number that raises my blood pressure quite a bit, but it pales into insignificance when I come across 96,558,138,226. That is a number that strikes terror into my very core and I just hope it isn’t amongst the numbers that Nolan is warning us about.
Some people may say that I’m being irrational.
Nonsense
What about π?
Now that’s irrational.
How do you tell when a number is worrying?
Does it become irrational? Maybe withdrawn because it is not prime? Or because it consider itself odd? or even negative? Or one of the vulgar fraction that is condemned to repeat for ever more.
You have to feel sorry for a number that is imaginary, worth the square root of FA?.
Then there all the poor ones that are binary.. The confused hexadecimal number that does not know if it is alphabetic or integral.
Enough of this nonsense. Stop worrying the numbers.
Nonsense it may be, but Nolan is worried. Poor chap. Maybe he should switch off his Spectrum?
Some numbers are fun:
2021 is composed of two consecutive numbers and is itself the product of two consecutive primes, 43 & 47
Your Pi symbol does not show up clearly – perhaps a picture of a pie would be better?
I used find the square root of -1 worrying until I realised it was just my imagination.
I used to have enough trouble with x and y without worrying about any of those long numbers.
Just to be silly, a weekly number of 4 million would be not worrying. There would still be some un-infected but give it another 2 weeks and there will be no-one who could pass it on to those others.
It's your middling or mediocre numbers that are worrying.