Just a couple of weeks ago, a new prime number was found by computers: this is 257,885,161 – 1, a number with more than 17 million digits. Wow! Known as a Mersenne prime, which is a prime number of the [… more]
Jun 09 2011
Have you heard of perfect numbers? Six is the first perfect number. It is regarded as “perfect” because it is equal to the sum of its proper divisors (or aliquot sum); these divisors include 1 but exclude the number itself. [… more]
Chapter 2 of “The Pythagorean Theorem — A 4000 Year History” tells us that Pythagoras founded a school when he settled in Greek around 530 BCE. His students — the Pythagoreans — studied mainly philosophy, mathematics and astronomy. The Pythagoreans [… more]
Many of us would have learned about the Pythagoras’ Theorem during Maths class in our secondary school days. Yup, it’s that famous a2 + b2 = c2 equation that relates to the sides of a right-angled triangle. The diagram on [… more]
