It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, but here’s a selection of Twitter accounts you may wish to follow. This week, the theme is numbers!
36871
— Prime Numbers (@_primes_) March 14, 2014
While I usually try to pull out an interesting tweet to showcase the brilliance of the accounts I recommend, in this case the account is tweeting every prime number. It’s run by an automated script, which you can see the code for, and according to its bio, aims to tweet “Every prime number, eventually”. Ambitious.
100,000,000,000,000,000,000: Approximate number of transistors in the world — What-If Numbers (@whatifnumbers) November 23, 2013
Randall Munroe, who writes the excellent and often mathematical webcomic XKCD, also posts on a blog answering ‘What-if?’ questions, in which he often goes into unnecessary and brilliant detail. Excitingly, he’s recently announced the publication of a book collecting some of the best answers he’s written, but this account tweets interesting numbers which have come up during the process of research.
25 is interesting. It is the smallest composite perfect square that can be written as a sum of two other composite perfect squares. — Interesting Numbers (@InterestingNums) March 11, 2014
Based on the age-old ‘what’s the smallest uninteresting number’ paradox (if there were such a number, it’d be interesting and therefore everyone would stop listening to you because you’re an idiot), this account is finding something interesting to say about every integer, starting at the bottom and working upwards.
1:04:01 14/03/14 http://t.co/AkhPOMG0Lk Continued fraction for cube root of 93. — Today Is Special (@823years) March 14, 2014
Created by sometime Aperiodical author Andrew Taylor, this account parodies the internet’s obsession with date coincidences, by tweeting the time and date every time it, in some order, coincides with part of a sequence in OEIS. Which is often. Probably not practical as a follow, since it’d just clog up your stream (on the fertile 11/12/13 last December, it tweeted 372 times in one day) but it is magnificent.
5. RD Bot
@rdbot Can I have a Random Number please?
— The Aperiodical (@aperiodical) March 14, 2014
@aperiodical 87
— rdBot (@rdbot) March 14, 2014
In need of a random number? Simply send a tweet to @rdbot, and it’ll reply within a few minutes. It can also take some instructions, such as if you tell it to roll a D20 or give you a random number in a specified range. Useful? I think so.