Whether for doing mental arithmetic or impressing the crowd, certain numerical values need to be learned by heart. The digits of π are an important example, but a particularly tricky one to memorize, since they follow no simple pattern. To overcome the difficulty, nothing beats alexandrine verse.
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Mathematical recreations feature prominently in the Arab-Islamic tradition, yet they do not appear to have been collected in dedicated anthologies. Some examples, very well known in Europe, pose a real challenge to historians seeking to trace how they circulated.
The appendix to Gabriel Cramer's Introduction à l’analyse des lignes courbes algébriques contains the famous rule for solving systems of linear equations and Bézout's theorem.
Are billions, trillions, quadrillions and the like beyond our grasp? Not necessarily. With approximate calculations, many immense numbers become perfectly intelligible.
They contain no data, yet a little ingenuity and plenty of common sense are all you need to work them out in your head: welcome to the world of the wacky problems invented by physicist Enrico Fermi.
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