There’s a lot happening this Friday.
First off, good luck with your Friday the Thirteenth. Here’s hoping your umbrella stays closed indoors, ladders stay off your walkways, and the salt remains in its upright and locked positions, and that anything else you might be superstitious* about generally stays the hell away from you today. (And if you didn’t think there were lots of superstitions, try again.)
* It is said that mathematician Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac had a horse shoe that hung over the door to his office. One day a student asked him if he really believed that the horse shoe brought him good luck. Dirac’s supposed reply: “I understand it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not.”
I’m not particularly superstitious about most things, particularly those based on the mystical evil properties of numbers, but I do tend to give Friday the Thirteenth a decent helping of respect, if only because I once broke my right arm and simultaneously fractured every bone in my left wrist on a single, particularly unlucky, Friday the Thirteenth.
Next, Happy 1234567890 Day! Back in 1202, Leonardo of Pisa — better known to us nowadays as Fibonacci — published the Liber Abaci, an arithmetic textbook widely recognized as the critical introduction of the Arabic numeral system to the Western world. In the book, Fibonacci says:
Following my introduction, as a consequence of marvelous instruction in the art, to the nine digits of the Hindus, the knowledge of the art very much appealed to me before all others… The nine Indian figures are:
And with these nine figures, and with the sign O, any number may be written.
Today is not the anniversary of this introduction.
Rather, apparently today at 4:31:30 PM, MST, exactly one billion, two-hundred thirty-four million, five-hundred sixty-seven thousand, eight-hundred ninety seconds (excluding leap seconds) will have passed since the midnight January 1, 1970 inception of the Unix Epoch of Coordinated Universal Time, a time system widely used in many computer systems, Unix being primary among them. That is, at the time above, Unix Time will read exactly 1234567890.
Extra credit if you can figure out when “12345678901 Day” will be.
Finally, Happy Pre-Valentine’s Day. And for all you readers… all four of you… let me say
And for those of you without access to an implicit 3D plotter, the set in the brackets is plotted below.
