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.)

Comments

Strange way to promote a movie

[JoeyRox]

Find the most tenuous connection between the number 73 and sporting events and then talk about the plot of a completely unrelated movie.

Re:Base 10

[mrchaotica]

Not to mention, at what point does a number being "interesting" stop being mathematics and start being numerology? I mean, are things like taxicab numbers and 'emirps' useful for anything?

Re:Base 10

[ShanghaiBill]

Primes, in all bases, are highly useful in many areas, encryption being a good one most people likely know of.

Engineering is another area, prime-sizing, matrices and so many practical uses.

Also biology. Cicadas and locusts tend to appear in cycles based on primes, such as every 13 or 17 years. If they instead used a composite period, like, say 12, then they could be prey to predators that had a 3, 4, or 6 year cycle.

For the same reason, machinery sometimes use gears or belts with a prime number of teeth. That can reduce vibrations by eliminating some possible resonances.

Re:It is not 6th emirp

[Wraithlyn]

The actual definition is "a prime number that results in a different prime when its decimal digits are reversed."

So, single digits, and palindromes (like 11) don't count.