Is Your Lucky Number Here ?

I was sat in the bath thinking -  Why is there only one monopolies commission? - (as you do)

Then chuckled to myself as I thought about a lady friend – a bit aged – like mwah, who told me she had changed her doctor.

She said, I sat there as he read through the medical file that contained my very extensive medical history.

After he finished all 19 pages, he looked up at me, saying -

“You look much better in person than you do on paper”

The thoughts were triggered by a book I’ve been reading about numbers. I learned basic sums only at our small village school, but I have always been fascinated by numbers and have a good natural quickness with mental arithmetic.

And this post gives a tiny glimpse of a very vast subject, ending with the almost non-existent appreciation today of the importance of Zero.

I like magic squares. A couple of examples here

The answer always adds to 15, whichever way you turn the screen

Twist and turn for evermore -They all add up to 34

And on and on, becoming ever more bigger, complex and intriguing.

It is thought magic squares inspired the creation of Sudoku. A puzzle created by Maki Kaji by adapting Howard Garns puzzle square 'Number Place'.

Kaji called his game Sudoku, the Japanese name for 'the number must appear only once'

But it was the invention of a computer programme by New Zealander Wayne Gould that

led to the mass worldwide popularity of the game.

His licensed programme enabled newspapers to devise and print different Sudoku puzzles every day with the push of a button.

Can animals calculate ?

I was reading about experiments with animals to find if they can count?

Because animals must have some indication of numbers and quantities. It is essential for their survival. If a monkey can look up a tree and see which has the most fruit, it can save much energy in searching, so is less likely to go hungry.

Another conclusion was lions must have a sense of numbers in deciding whether to attack.

In an experiment a lone lioness was walking back to the pride at dusk. A loudspeaker had been hidden in bushes and a single lions roar was played.

The lioness ignored it and carried on walking.

But when five lionesses were together and the roar of three lionesses were played, the five halted, looked in the direction of the roaring three, and charged into the bushes to fight.

The conclusion was that the lionesses were comparing quantities in their heads. The single lioness hearing the roar of one other, walked on, deciding that one v one was too risky.

But the five hearing the roar of three, reasoned that with a five to three advantage the attack was on.

If lions can calculate, it made me wonder if those three incredibly brave African natives, in the famous BBC video, targeted the same lion group each time to rob them of their kill?

Wouldn’t the lions grow familiar with the tactic, become contemptuous and unafraid - Remember the nerve chilling, suspense filled video?

When Nothing Means Everything.

Though people have always understood the concept of nothing, or having nothing, the concept of zero as a value is relatively new; it fully developed in India around the fifth century A.D., perhaps a couple of centuries earlier.

 Before then, mathematicians struggled to perform the simplest arithmetic calculations.

Today, zero — both as a symbol (or numeral) and a concept meaning the absence of any quantity — allows us to perform calculus, do complicated equations, and to have invented computers.

Robert Kaplan, author of "The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero," suggests that an ancestor to zero may have been a placeholder in the form of a pair of angled wedges, used to represent an empty number column.

However, Charles Seife, author of "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea," disagrees that the wedges represented a placeholder.

The Sumerians' system passed through the Akkadian Empire to the Babylonians around 300 B.C. There, Kaplan agrees, a symbol appeared that was clearly a placeholder — a way to tell 10 from 100 or to signify, for example, that in the number 2,025, there is no number in the hundreds column.

Initially, the Babylonians left an empty space in their cuneiform number system, but when that became confusing, they added a symbol — double angled wedges — to represent the empty column.

The realization that zero was not just a placeholder symbol and valueless, but indeed, would prove to be the invaluable opposite, is considered to have started in India

The discovery gradually found its way to the wider world, where it enabled inventions of new systems of calculation, leading to modern mathematics and the sophisticated achievements we know and benefit with today.

Kaplan says "So commonplace has zero become, that few, if any, realize its astounding role in the lives of every single person in the world,"

I said in an earlier post that – ‘Without the discovery of electricity’ - there would not be computers or the internet, and consequently not the living standards we now enjoy.

I think that should be amended to - 'Without the discovery of Zero.'

For the want of a Zero, electricity was lost, for the want of electricity, computing was lost, for the want of computers ? ……