Here’s one of the cooler things you will see today.
Sexy.
The above is called The Curta, and it is the only mechanical calculator ever invented. Not only that, it came into the world in a very unlikely place. An Austrian with a Jewish father named Curt Herzstark designed the prototype while a prisoner in the Buchenwald Concentration camp. The guards were aware of it but allowed him to continue because he was known as an engineering genius. He was even told that if he got it to work, it would be presented to Hitler as a present, he (Herzstark) would be declared an Aryan and everything would be champagne and caviar. Luckily for all of us, the war ended and Herzstark was set free. He shopped around, finally getting the Prince of Lichtenstein to invest in his project and the first Curta was made in 1948.
Now he’s another present for the math nerd in your life.
And by ‘math nerd,’ I mean me. Get me one of these.
That sleek and rather ominous looking thing is called a super egg. No matter how you set it down, it will always stand up. It was designed by a Danish artist/scientist who wanted to make a three dimensional model of a hyperbolic shape. John Lennon gave one to Uri Geller with the words: “Keep it. It’s too weird for me. If it’s my ticket to another planet, I don’t wanna go there.”
It’s too weird for you?! Have you SEEN your wife? Moving on.
Now the subject I have been looking forward to getting to. A saga that goes from 4000 years ago to this afternoon’s lunchbreak.
According to legend, in 2000 BC, the Chinese Emperor Yu saw a divine turtle coming out of the Yellow River. It ahd black and white dots on its underbelly that if you replaced the dots with Arabic numerals would look like:
That is the lo shu or Magic Circle. Every row and column adds up to fifteen. Magic Circles were something of a craze for centuries. When Benjamin Franklin was bored, he would draw various Magic cirlces of diverse configurations.
No doubt, already the wheels in your head are turning, making connections. Hold on to your pencils.
In 1979, a puzzle enthusiast who was also an architect introduced a game called Number Place. His name was Howard Garns. The story may have ended there, except that Maki Kaji, the editor of a Japanese puzzle magazine absolutely loved it, made Garns’ designs (at the time called Latin Squares) more symmetrical and called it Sudoku, Japanese for ‘the number must appear only once.” So if you thought you were part of an ancient East Asian tradition, you’re kind of right. But you’re also playing a game made forty years ago by some white dude in Indiana.
While Sudoku is intensely popular, the undisputed champion of the mathlete has got to be Erno Rubik’s attempt at making a 3D 15Puzzle (Those grids where you have to move pieces around to try to get the picture right). Since Rubik introduced his cube in 1974, records have been made, broken and made again.
The current record for solving a regular Cube is held by a 23 year old Dutch student, who did it when he was 19. It took Erik Akkersjiij just 7.08 seconds. There are also records for doing it with feet, solving it one handed, blindfolded, on a roller coaster, underwater, with chopsticks, idling on a unicycle and in free fall (not all at the same time of course). Bit of a factoid here: There are 43000000000000000000 possible Rubik’s Cube positions.
That’s a large number. Speaking of large numbers, the largest prime number is 2, raised to the power of 43112609 minus 1.
Remember that Hungarian aristocrat who used radiation to prove his landlady was recycling his meat? Apparently scientists are very picky about their food. A French mathematician named Poincare believed he was being scammed by his bakery. Every day for a year, he weighed his 1 kilogram loaf of bread. The weight distribution follow a normal bell curve (which had only recently been discovered), but proved that on average, his ‘one kilo’ bread was really 950 grams, skimping him out on 50 grams worth of bread. He duly alerted Parisian authorities and the baker was ‘sternly warned.’
The French weren’t the only ones using scientific means in strange ways. In 1874, Francis Galton, walked all over Britain measuring…not kidding here, female attractiveness. His methodology was this: Everytime he saw a woman, he poked a piece of paper in his pocket, putting her on a scale of pretty to testicle-receeding. He concluded by this ‘rigorous’ study that London had the highest quantity of beautiful women, while Aberdeen, Scotland, had the ugliest. Incidentally, Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin and coined the word ‘eugenics,’ which, unfortunately now means we assume him to be a crazy supremacist, but all he was arguing was that some traits are inherited and we should encourage those.
I realize that was a short post, and I hope you enjoyed this foray into math. Have some good history stuff coming your way soon. Until then, enjoy this nonsense about mermaids.
Let Me Ruin That For You 