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Golden State and the Mathematical Magic of Seventy-Three (newyorker.com)
Charles Bethea has written a fascinating piece on the number '73' for The New Yorker. Below are some tidbits from the story but I urge you to hit the New Yorker link and read the story in entirety there. Bethea writes: "I am aware of the Warriors's push for seventy-three wins," Ken Ono, a professor of mathematics at Emory University and the author of "The Web of Modularity: Arithmetic of the Coefficients of Modular Forms and q-series," said recently. [...] Professor Ono worked as a math consultant on a film called "The Man Who Knew Infinity," which stars Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons, and which screens this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, in New York. The movie centers on the friendship of the legendary Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (Patel) and his Cambridge University colleague G. H. Hardy (Irons), and it depicts a famous story that Hardy once told about Ramanujan. "I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney," Hardy said. "I had ridden in taxicab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied. "It is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways." One cubed plus twelve cubed, and nine cubed plus ten cubed. This was the first of what came to be known as "taxicab numbers." [...] So what does Professor Ono think of seventy-three? "I really like the number seventy-three," he said. "It is the sixth 'emirp.'" An emirp, he explained, is a prime number that remains prime when its digits are reversed. (Emirp, of course, is 'prime' spelled backward.)
I saw this on the front page while it was still littered with broken Unicode. Thanks for actually doing some editing, but you guys missed one: oetaxicab.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
My God, it's full of stars...
What's so special about base 10? There are other primes in base 9 that are also prime when the digits are reversed. And base 8. Does it really provide any useful information?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
This was the first of what came to be known as 'oetaxicab numbers.'
A what number?
"It is the sixth 'emirp.' An emirp, he explained, is a prime number that remains prime when its digits are reversed. (Emirp, of course, is 'prime spelled backward.)
You've got something weird going on with your quotes there.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Although 73 works for binary, but not hex.
Was also the last really good year for American pop music, before disco took over. Then came the '80s.
That ended a 75 year run. Look it up.
Find the most tenuous connection between the number 73 and sporting events and then talk about the plot of a completely unrelated movie.
But Ramanujan was never taught the process of writing down formal proofs, he self thought everything from a handbook of mathematical identities. Rediscovering several things others had already discovered and proved. He was utterly at a loss to explain how he was able to do math. He simply said, "I look at the equation or a problem. Then Goddess Namagiri Devi writes the answer in my tongue and I recite it". (not an accurate quote, paraphrased by me)
I wish it was Lord Oppiliappan, the family deity of his dad, not Namagiri Devi the consort of the family deity of his mom. Because Lord Oppiliappan is my family deity too. Would have gotten me some bragging rights.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
prime and emirp? WTF does that matter? It's a meaningless observation.
Of course there are mathematical relationships between the digits of numbers and factorization.
But, change the base and everything changes. Why? because:
base : char encoding
as
a number : code point
Thus spending time analyzing the relationships between digits in one base for one number seems a waste of time.
One cubed seems like cheating.
...42.
As a number theorist at an R1 university, I agree with this after one insertion is made. It seems that a lot of amateur number theory is just numerology. At it still can be quite entertaining.
Slashdot declines my post on the number 12 and puts out this clearly biased post on the number 73! This is a mainstream media scandal. 12 might leave the numberline and become an independent number if it doesn't get treated fairly.
What you don't seem to care about though is the fascination with the idea that numbers, in whatever base, express reality.
Working through "the relationships between digits" is simply a primitive form of a deeper insight.
"73" is well known in the telegrapher community as the code for "Best Wishes". It is commonly used in ham radio to this day.
Fiat Lux.
Time to teach Golden State some new math.
NERDS!
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
Huh. I wonder why the math professor found it surprising that MJ was a strong math student?
I know a guy, Walter, who's obsession with a particular number did not end well.
The article defines emirp as below:
“It is the sixth ‘emirp.’ ” An emirp, he explained, is a prime number that remains prime when its digits are reversed.
Here are the emirp numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 31, 37, 71, 73. So it is eleventh emirp.
just sayin
Added to queue. Netflix still rocks.
This is why people have lost respect for science.
I can't believe nobody has yet mentioned this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This is why Sheldon often wears a blue shirt with the number 73 on it.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
numbers are just constructs of the human mind; reality is independent of them even if we can make useful models of reality with numbers.
I first saw that story about Rajamujan and Hardy in The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers which gave me hours of numerical pleasure.
Strangely, when my advisor told me that story he said it was a house number ...
73!!!!
Mathematicians have a running joke that all numbers are interesting.
The proof is by contradiction. The integers are a well-ordered set. Consider the smallest uninteresting number. Very interesting, isn't it?
Still, I don't see it yet as a whipslash tag.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway