11 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 35.6 ms ] thread
I wonder which one is least special.
Wouldn't that then become a self-fulfilling loop? That number's non-specialness would be something special about it, so you'd need the next non-special number, and so on until they were all covered.
The lowest dominated strategy for the "smallest unique integer" game with 3 players.
I thought "42" was the meaning of life?
9945 = 17!!!!

I can't stop laughing at this one.

...why?
Well, in writing -- Internet discourse in particular -- multiple exclamation marks are occasionally (ab)used to indicate absurd levels of emotional intensity on the part of the speaker. The factorial operation is also denoted by an exclamation mark; to someone unfamiliar with that fact, or someone capable of intentionally conflating the two usages, it appears that the statement "9945 = 17!!!!" represents someone excitedly asserting a falsehood (i.e. "9945 = 17") or possibly suggesting that shouting a number somehow increases its value.

Each line on the linked article is a more-or-less stoic mathematical fact, and the humor comes from the subversion of this expectation when the entry for 9945 is misinterpreted as I described.

I noticed most (maybe all) of the links go to wolfram math world. Out of curiosity, I compared a few entries there against Wikipedia, and I like the latter a lot better. My sample size was pretty small, though.