Even if you're not a mathematics nerd, let us persuade you to come to the nerd side with a few interesting math facts. Are you familiar with the interesting number paradox, for instance? Basically, there's a theory in mathematics that some numbers are interesting and some are uninteresting.
Examples of interesting numbers would be prime numbers, because we can only divide them by 1 and themselves. So, 2, 3, 5, 7, and so on are considered interesting numbers. Perfect numbers are also interesting because they are equal to the sum of their factors: 6, 28, 496, and 8128. Square or cube numbers are also considered interesting.
But the interesting number paradox states that all numbers are, in fact, interesting. If we were to take an otherwise insignificant number like 51, we could call it the smallest uninteresting number. However, that would by design make it interesting: its status as "the smallest uninteresting number" would qualify it to become interesting.
If we were to apply this logic to all the other "uninteresting" numbers, they would all, one by one, become interesting. In the attempt to classify each of them as "the smallest uninteresting number," we would effectively make them interesting. "It is also the first number to be simultaneously interesting and uninteresting," popular mathematics author David Wells wrote in "The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers”.
If you're a fan of any kind of board game that requires a die, you might be familiar with this next one. The sum of the two opposite sides of a standard six-sided die will always be seven. Why is that? It has been done this way since ancient times as both the Greeks and the Ancient Egyptians produced dice like that.
But, according to osteoarchaeologist Hans Christian Küchelmann, there is no other explanation than the fact that it's a neat and harmonious trick. "Seven is a prime number and thus of special mathematical significance," Küchelmann writes. Ancient Greeks were really into that kind of stuff, so they made such dice the standard. "While in today's dice games the least probable combination is the most valuable, in antique times the most harmonic combination […] was the highest valued."
A standard deck of playing cards includes 52 cards. But did you know that if you shuffle it, the number of possible combinations that the cards might fall into is an 8 followed by 67 zeros. According to McGill University, there are more ways to shuffle a deck than there are atoms in the universe. Essentially, every time you shuffle a deck of cards, you're getting a unique arrangement of the 52 cards that may have never been made in history.
"Though a long-time blackjack dealer might feel like they have shuffled thousands of cards in their lifetime, against a number this big, their rearrangements are irrelevant," Cassandra Lee writes for McGill University. "There are simply too many ways to arrange 52 cards for any randomly organized set of cards to have repeated itself."
