Did You know? (Mathematics and Science Trivia)

Math Interesting and Amazing Facts

Cool Facts

The word 'mathematics' comes from the Greek máthēma, which means learning, study, science.

Do you know a word known as Dyscalculia? Dyscalculia means difficulty in learning arithmetic, such as difficulty in understanding numbers, and learning maths facts! 

In America, mathematics is known as 'math', they say that 'mathematics' functions as a singular noun so as per them 'math' should be singular too.

Do you know 'Mathematics' is an anagram of 'me asthmatic' (An Anagram is word or phrase made by transposing or rearranging letter of other words or phrase.)

Notches (cuts or indentation) on animal bones prove that humans have been doing mathematics since around 30,000 BC.

What comes after a million, billion and trillion? A quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion and undecillion.

The number 5 is pronounced as 'Ha' in Thai language. 555 is also used by some as slang for 'HaHaHa'.

Different names for the number 0 include zero, nought, naught, nil, zilch and zip. Zero ( 0 ) is the only number which can not be represented by Roman numerals.

The name 'zero' derives from the Arabic word sifr which also gave us the English word 'cipher' meaning 'a secret way of writing' .

Do you know the magic of no. nine (9)? Multiply any number with nine (9 ) and then sum all individual digits of the result (product) to make it single digit, the sum of all these individual digits would always be nine (9).

Here is an interesting trick to check divisibility of any number by number 3. A number is divisible by three if the sum of its digits is divisible by three (3). 

The = sign ("equals sign") was invented by 16th Century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing "is equal to" in his equations.

Googol (meaning & origin of Google brand ) is the term used for a number 1 followed by 100 zeros and that it was used by a nine-year old, Milton Sirotta, in 1940. The name of the popular search engine 'Google' came from a misspelling of the word 'googol'.

Abacus is considered the origin of the calculator.

Have you ever noticed that the opposite sides a die always add up to seven (7). 

12,345,678,987,654,321 is the product of 111,111,111 x 111,111,111. Notice the sequence of the numbers 1 to 9 and back to 1.

Plus (+) and Minus (-) sign symbols were used as early as 1489 A.D.

An icosagon is a shape with 20 sides.

Trigonometry is the study of the relationship between the angles of triangles and their sides.

If you add up the numbers 1-100 consecutively (1+2+3+4+5...) the total is 5050.

2 and 5 are the only primes that end in 2 or 5.From 0 to 1,000, the letter "A" only appears in 1,000 ("one thousand").

A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

'FOUR' is the only number in the English language that is spell with the same number of letters as the number itself 40 when written "forty" is the only number with letters in alphabetical order, while "one" is the only one with letters in reverse order.

In a group of 23 people, at least two have the same birthday with the probability greater than 1/2 . If there are 50 students in a class then it's virtually certain that two will share the same birthday.

Among all shapes with the same perimeter a circle has the largest area.Among all shapes with the same area circle has the shortest perimeter .

In 1995 in Taipei, citizens were allowed to remove '4' from street numbers because it sounded like 'death' in Chinese. Many Chinese hospitals do not have a 4th floor.

The word "FRACTION" derives from the Latin " fractio - to break".

In working out mathematical equations, the Greek mathematician , Pythagoreans used little rocks to represent numbers.Hence the name of Calculus was born which means pebbles in Greek.

In many cultures no 13 is considered unlucky, well,there are many myths around it . One is that In some ancient European religions, there were 12 good gods and one evil god; the evil god was called the 13th god. Other is superstition goes back to the Last Supper. There were 13 people at the meal, including Jesus Christ, and Judas was thought to be the 13th guest.

Have you heard about Fibonacci? It is the sequence of numbers wherein a number is the result of adding the two numbers before it! Here is an example: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on.

Want to remember the value of Pi (3.1415926) in easy way ? You can do it by counting each word's letters in 'May I have a large container of coffee?'

Have you heard about a Palindrome Number? It is a number that reads the same backwards and forward, e.g. 12421.

Credits: Compiled by C.Bhaskar, Professor of Mathematics,DS College,Kolkatta http://www.makemegenius.com/cool-facts/maths-interesting-and-amazing-facts