14 More Weird Math Facts

 Today I'm back to share more interesting math facts with you. Some of these facts show that math is all around us, while others show something interesting that would make the basis of a "What do you notice?" question.

1.  The first fact involves cicadas which are a type of insect we often hear on a hot summer night.  The cicada's life cycle is based on prime numbers.  For the first 13 or 17 years of their lives, they spend underground before emerging to mate.

2.  Usually when we talk about geometric shapes in real life, we discuss triangles, squares, or rectangles but if you look at a baseball playing field, the baseball diamond is actually a perfect rhombus.

3.  If you have a bunch of two dimensional shapes such as a square, rectangle, pentagon, circle, etc, all with the same area, and you calculate the perimeter, the circle will have the smallest one.

4.  Now if you take the same shapes mentioned in number three with all the same perimeter and calculate the area, the circle will have the largest area.

5.  Imaginary numbers are used in the real world to describe electrical currants among other things such as signal processing and radar.

6. If you begin at the center of the sunflower and work your way to the outer edge in a spiral pattern, you'll notice the petals are arranged in the Fibonacci sequence of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8.....

7.  If you take time to really look at Roman Numerals, you will notice there is no symbol to represent 0 by itself.  You'll find 10, 50, or 100 but not 0.

8.  The written word for the number 40 is the only number whose letters are in alphabetical order.  Look at it - forty.

9. If you look at the spelled out version of odd number such as one, three, five, etc, every single word has the letter "e" in it.

10.  The written words for 11 + 2 is an anagram for the same written words of 12 +1.  So the letters in "eleven plus two" can be rewritten into "twelves plus one".

11.  We've all heard the saying "Back in a jiffy!".  Well jiffy is actually defined as 1/100 of a second.

12.  If you add up the two numbers on opposite sides on a dice,  the sum always equals seven. This is because the 1 and 6,  2 and 5,  3 and 4 are opposite.

13.  It should take no more than 20 moves to solve a Rubick's cube regardless of the starting position of the cube.  There are over 43 quintillion possible starting positions on a Rubick's cube.

14. If the clock you have hung on the wall uses Roman numerals, it most likely uses IIII instead of IV for four.

Just a few facts to use as warm ups this fall.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.