INTERESTING FUN FACTS OF MATHEMATICS

1. You can cut a cake into 8 pieces by using only 3 cuts.

You just need to make two cuts in a vertical plane and one in a horizontal plane. 

 2. The numbers on opposite sides of a dice always add up to seven

 On a dice the numbers 1,2 and 3 all share a vertex.  If these three numbers run clockwise round this vertex then the dice is called left-handed and if the three numbers run anti-clockwise round the vertex, then it is a right-handed dice.   Chinese dice are normally left-handed and Western dice are normally right-handed.

3. William Shanks calculated pi to 707 decimal places but made a mistake on the 528^th digit.

Amateur mathematicia William Shanks (1812-1882) spent a good part of his life calculating mathematical constants by hand.  Shanks never found out about his mistake as it wasn’t revealed until after his death.

4. The word googol was made up by a 9-year old boy

In the 1930s an American Mathematician named Edward Kasner asked his nine-year old nephew Milton Sirotta to make up a word for him to use. Milton made up the world ‘googol’ which Edward Kasner later used to describe the number  .  The search engine Google was later named after the ‘googol’ meaning that Milton Sirotta had unwittingly helped name one of the world’s most famous companies.

5. The word “hundred” comes from the old Norse term, “hundrath”, which actually means 120 and not 100. In a room of 23 people there’s a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday.