Who is 42 about

Press Inquiries. Press Contact : Sandi Miller. Email: sandim mit. Phone: Department of Physics. Caption :. Credits :. That is, are there three cubes whose sum is 42? Sutherland is also a fan of Douglas Adams, so the project was irresistible. Why couldn't Bristol's supercomputer solve this problem? Gizmodo Ryan Mandelbaum writes for Gizmodo about the efforts of principal research scientist Andrew Sutherland and others to use a crowd-sourced supercomputer to solve a math problem that scientists have been working on since the s.

Related Articles. International team launches vast atlas of mathematical objects. More MIT News. Radio-frequency wave scattering improves fusion simulations By incorporating the scattering of RF waves into fusion simulations, MIT physicists improve heating and current drive predictions for fusion plasmas. Ancient Tibet had 42 rulers. Nyatri Tsenpo, who reigned around B.

And Langdarma, who ruled from to A. His answer, posted in the online discussion group alt. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. End of story. Apart from allusions to 42 deliberately introduced by computer scientists for fun and the inevitable encounters with it that crop up when you poke around a bit in history or the world, you might still wonder whether there is anything special about the number from a strictly mathematical point of view.

In base 2, the n th element may be specified by repeating 10 n times As n increases, the density of numbers tends toward zero, which means that the numbers belonging to this list, including 42, are exceptionally rare. The density of these numbers also tends toward zero at infinity.

Forty-two is a Catalan number. These numbers are extremely rare, much more so than prime numbers: only 14 of the former are lower than one billion. Catalan numbers were first mentioned, under another name, by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, who wanted to know how many different ways an n -sided convex polygon could be cut into triangles by connecting vertices with line segments. And like the two preceding sequences, the density of numbers is null at infinity.

The first practical numbers are 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 18, 20, 24, 28, 30, 32, 36, 40, 42, 48, 54, 56, 60, 64, 66 and 72 sequence A in OEIS. No simple known formula provides the n th element of this sequence. All this is amusing, but it would be wrong to say that 42 is really anything special mathematically. The numbers 41 and 43, for example, are also elements of many sequences. You can explore the properties of various numbers on Wikipedia.

What makes a number particularly interesting or uninteresting is a question that mathematician and psychologist Nicolas Gauvrit, computational natural scientist Hector Zenil and I have studied, starting with an analysis of the sequences in the OEIS.

Computer scientists and mathematicians recognize the appeal of the number 42 but have always thought that it was a simple game that could be played just as well with another number. Still, a recent news item caught their attention.

And for such integers, how do you find a , b and c? As a practical matter, the difficulty in making this calculation is that for a given n , the space of the triplets to be considered involves negative integers. This triplet space is therefore infinite, unlike the computation for the sum of squares. For that particular problem, any solution has an absolute value lower than the square root of a given n.

Moreover for the sum of squares, we know perfectly well what is possible and impossible. For the sum of cubes, some solutions may be surprisingly large, such as the one for , which was discovered in When we do so, we see that:. And on the same page of Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein reveals he is able to create life.

In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence gives Juliet a potion that allows for her to be in a death-like coma for "two and forty hours". The result of the most famous game in English football — the world cup final of — was The type 42 vacuum tube was one of the most popular audio output amplifiers of the s. Samuel Johnson compiled the Dictionary of the English Language, regarded as one of the greatest works of scholarship. In a nine-year period he defined a total of 42, words.

The wonder horse Nijinsky was 42 months old in when he became the last horse to win the English Triple Crown: the Derby; the Guineas and the St Leger. The element molybdenum has the atomic number 42 and is also the 42nd most common element in the universe.

After murdering a guard he spent 42 years in solitary confinement in different prisons. In the Book of Revelation, it is prophesised that the beast will hold dominion over the earth for 42 months. When the growing numbers of Large Hadron Collider scientists acquired more office space recently, they named their new complex Building In an episode of The Simpsons, police chief Wiggum wakes up to a question aimed at him and replies "42". Best Western is the world's largest hotel chain with more than 4, hotels in 80 countries.

There are 42 principles of Ma'at, the ancient Egyptian goddess — and concept — of physical and moral law, order and truth. Mungo Jerry's hit "In the Summertime", written by Ray Dorset, has a tempo of 42 beats per minute.