The world of mathematics is full of strange and wonderful discoveries. Check out the cool math facts below and share them with your students to build their knowledge and interest in the field! Did you know all of them already?
- 1. Cuts and indentations found on ancient animal bones show that humans have been doing mathematics since around 30,000 B.C.
2. You know a million, billion, and trillion, but what comes after? A quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion and undecillion.
3. When written out as “forty,” 40 is the only number where the letters are in alphabetical order. “One” is the only number with the letters in reverse order.
4. Zero is the only number that can’t be represented by Roman numerals.
5. The number nine is magic! Multiply any number with nine and then add all the individual digits of the result to get a single digit. The sum of the individual digits will always be nine!
6. Historians consider the abacus to be the origin of the modern calculator.
7. The opposite sides of a six-sided die will always add up to seven.
8. If you add up all the numbers from one to 100, the total will be 5050.
9. Two and five are the only prime numbers that end in a two or five.
10. In all the numbers from zero to 1,000, the letter “a” only appears one time: one thousand.
11. If there are 50 people in a room, it’s almost certain that two of them will have the same birthday.
12. Among all shapes with the same perimeter, a circle has the largest area. Among all shapes with the same area, a circle has the shortest perimeter.
13. A 2D shape with 20 sides is called an icosagon. A 3D shape with 20 sides is called an icosahedron.
14. While working out equations, Pythagoras used small rocks to represent numbers. From this, we get the name “Calculus,” which means “pebbles” in Greek.
15. A Fibonacci sequence is a sequence of numbers where each number is the result of adding the two numbers before it. For example: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34. The ratios between the numbers create the Golden Ratio, which can be see in nature all around us.
16. Want to easily remember the value of Pi to seven decimal points (3.1415926)? Count the number of letters in each word of this phrase: “May I have a large container of coffee?”
17. Palindromes are what we call numbers that read the same forward and backward, like 383 or 12,421.
