31–40 of 62 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe I read this in The Salmon of Doubt , where Douglas Adams explained he pretty much chose it arbitrarily. "42 will do", were his words, IIRC.
I second that: I definitely remember reading something in which Douglas Adams explained that he chose 42 arbitrarily. And I think he was surprised at and amused with everyone’s theories of the significance of the number.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. But its fun to play with numbers. One of the reasons I like 12, its so dividable.
If you like 12, should definitely check out 60! It has so many factors, especially prime factors.
I am sure that many of you are familiar with Dr. Feynman's 7-part lecture series entitled The Character of Physical Law, which were part of the "Messenger Lectures" [1], given at Cornell University in 1964.
In the first lecture, Law of Gravitation - An Example of Physical Law, Feynman states the following:
"Question: what is the ratio of the gravitational force to the electrical force? That is illustrated on the next slide.
The ratio of the gravitational attraction to the electrical repulsion is given by a number with 42 digits, and goes off here: all this is written very carefully out, so that's 42 digits.
Now, therein lies a very deep mystery: where could such a tremendous number come from? That means if you ever had a theory from which both of these things are to come, how could they come in such disproportion? From what equation has a solution which has for one, two kinds of forces, an attraction and a repulsion with that fantastic ratio? People have looked for such a large ratio in other places.
They're looking for a large number.
They hope, for example, that there's another large number.
And if you want a large number why not take the diameter of the universe to the diameter of a proton.
Amazingly enough, it also is a number with 42 digits." [2]
Obviously the article is written for fun, but for those interested Douglas Adams' answer to why 42 was: "The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story."
Now personally, I would argue that the actual question is unknowable, and that this is central to the point of the story, but this is just my opinion.
I'm not a math guy, but I was thinking about a number series the other day, and 42 popped up. Do the numbers 1,806; 3,263,442; and/or 10,650,056,950,806 happen to have any significance as well?
The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences is one of the coolest things on the net.
I'm not a math guy, but I was thinking about a number series the other day, and 42 popped up. Do the numbers 1,806; 3,263,442; and/or 10,650,056,950,806 happen to have any significance as well?
That sequence is called "Sylvester's sequence": http://oeis.org/A000058 The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences is one of the coolest things on the net.
Hurwitz's automorphisms theorem always astounds me. 84 is such a weird number to see in it. Fun fact: a group for which the maximum of 84(g-1) is reached is called a Hurwitz group. The Monster Group a Hurwitz group. So there is a Reimann surface of genus 9619255057077534236743570297163223297687552000000001 whose group of automorphisms (via orientation-preserving conformal mappings) is the Monster group. I don't even…