FACTS & DATA
MATH FACTS
Surprising Truths Behind the Numbers
Number Curiosities
Zero is the only number that cannot be represented in Roman numerals. The Romans had no symbol for nothing — the concept of zero as a number was developed in India around the 5th century CE.
A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros. The word was coined in 1920 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. Google named their company after it — with a spelling error.
Pi (π) has been calculated to over 100 trillion decimal places and never repeats. In 2021, a Swiss team set the world record using a computer that ran for 108 days straight.
The number 1 is neither prime nor composite. It is in a category by itself. This is why the definition of a prime number specifies 'greater than 1' — otherwise the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (unique prime factorization) would break down.
If you add up all the numbers from 1 to 100, the answer is 5,050. Young Carl Friedrich Gauss reportedly solved this in seconds as a schoolboy by pairing numbers: 1+100, 2+99, 3+98 … giving 50 pairs each summing to 101.
A prime number is divisible only by 1 and itself. As of 2024, the largest known prime has over 41 million digits. It was discovered using a distributed computing project called GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search).
Famous Mathematicians
Euclid of Alexandria (around 300 BCE) wrote 'Elements,' a 13-volume work that organized all of Greek mathematics. It remained the standard geometry textbook for over 2,000 years and is the second most printed book in history after the Bible.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was a self-taught Indian mathematician who, with almost no formal training, independently rediscovered and extended results that had taken European mathematicians centuries to develop. He mailed his work to Cambridge in 1913 and was invited to England by G.H. Hardy.
Emmy Noether (1882–1935) is considered one of the greatest algebraists of all time. Albert Einstein called her the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced. She was barred from university positions for years solely because she was a woman.
Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) is the most prolific mathematician in history. He published over 800 papers and books, introduced the notation f(x), e, i, π, and Σ, and continued producing mathematics for 17 years after going completely blind.
Math in the Real World
The Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 …) appears throughout nature: the spiral of a nautilus shell, the arrangement of sunflower seeds, the branching of trees, and the pattern of a pinecone all follow Fibonacci numbers.
GPS satellites must account for Einstein's theory of relativity. Clocks on satellites run slightly faster due to weaker gravity and slightly slower due to orbital speed. Without relativistic corrections applied daily, GPS positions would drift by about 10 kilometers per day.
The RSA encryption that secures your bank account, email, and online shopping relies on the fact that multiplying two large prime numbers is easy, but factoring the result back into those primes is computationally infeasible — even for the fastest computers.
A standard chess board has 64 squares. If you placed 1 grain of rice on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and doubled each time, the 64th square would require more grains of rice than have ever been grown in all of human history.
Mathematical Milestones
The Pythagorean theorem (a² + b² = c²) was known to the Babylonians over 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born. A clay tablet called Plimpton 322 (dated around 1800 BCE) contains a list of Pythagorean triples, suggesting systematic knowledge of the relationship.
Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem in 1995, solving a problem that had gone unsolved for 358 years. Pierre de Fermat had written in 1637 that he had a proof 'too large to fit in the margin.' Wiles's actual proof runs to over 100 pages.
The equal sign (=) was invented by Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde in 1557. He chose two parallel lines because 'no two things can be more equal.' Before this, mathematicians wrote out the word 'equals' in full every time.
There are seven unsolved Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics, each with a $1 million prize. As of 2024, only one has been solved: the Poincaré Conjecture, proved by Grigori Perelman in 2003 — who famously declined both the prize money and the Fields Medal.