5040 The Perfect Number

Plato mentions in his Laws that 5040 is a convenient number to use for dividing many things (including both the citizens and the land of a state) into lesser parts.  Claiming it to be the ideal population of a city, he thought that the people’s well-being depended almost as much on the number as on justice.  5040 as it turns out is a very special number. One of the reasons 5040 was so highly revered was because it is a superior highly composite number.  Translation: No other number below it has as many divisors.  5040 has the same amount of divisors as there are minutes in an hour, or seconds in a minute.  5040 is a very practical number, being divisible by 1-12, except 11.  There are only ten of these rare numbers below a million, and it just so happens that the combined radii of Earth and…

Continue reading

Palindromic Squares

Palindromic Squares

A palindrome is a word, phrase, or number which reads the same backward or forward.  The squares of 10, 11, 12, and 13 fit the bill.  It breaks down after that since 15 squared is 225, and 51 squared is 2601. Why only these 4 or arguably 3 numbers? Does this give credence to the notion that base 10 is an innate numerical matrix to our reality? Did we invent the decimal system or did we observe patterns in the numbers themselves and organize them according to nature? What is it about ten that makes numbers so easily scalable and calculable? I found this gem in a book by Marty Leeds.  I added the ten squared to it.  It works of course if you put two zeros before the one on the right side.  It’s weird how this works for 10, 11, 12, and 13.…

Continue reading