On the math-fun mailing list, Dick Hess posted “a couple of curiosities”:
A speaker at G4G16 noted that \(16^{16}\) ends in \(1616\).
A friend sent me this: \(499^{499}\) ends in \(499499\).Are there any other cases including numbers with more digits?
That does make me curious! I’ve kept that email in my inbox since March, hoping to have a go at finding more examples when I get some free time. Nobody else responded to the email, which is usually a sign that an answer is hard to find.
Can you believe it’s been 10 years since I made the “Is this prime?” game? I sort of can, because I set myself a reminder about it in my calendar.
Back in 2016, the game had been played 350,000 times and I wrote a post looking at the collected data.
10 years later, I thought I’d have another look.
A while ago I added a clock to my “Is this prime?” website: it shows you when the Unix time is a prime number of milliseconds.
Earlier today I had the thought that it could send you a notification when it’s prime time, so you won’t miss out even if you’re not staring at the page.
How annoying!
See for yourself: Is it prime time?
Here’s a question that’s been in the back of my head for a while:
Starting from 1 and with just the arithmetic operations + – × ÷ available to you , how quickly can you build up to a given target number?
You can do this on pen and paper, or even just in your head, but I thought it’d make a good online game. That’s what this post is about.
Maths Week England happened a couple of weeks ago. I had put my name on the speaker directory, and sure enough a maths lead from a primary school in County Durham emailed me to ask if I could go in and do something for them.
Here’s an update on my progress in the Beach Spectres project. I’ve put out two update videos since the last post but failed to write a post here. I promise I’m trying my best to be more organised than usual!
Somehow, I’ve been awarded the MEGA grant, from Matt Parker and Talking Maths in Public, for a ridiculous public maths project. I’d better get on that, then!
My plan is to go to the beach and use great big cookie cutters in the shape of the spectre aperiodic monotile to cover as much space as possible.