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Interview with Derrick Niederman, author of Number Freak | Math-Blog - The Diigo Meta page

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Gialloporpora bookmarked on 2009-10-22 math interview people

In this interview we sit down with author and mathematician Derrick Niederman to discuss his engaging, recently published book about the first two hundred natural numbers, ‘Number Freak: From 1 to 200, The Hidden Language of Numbers Revealed’.

  • Other than that, I deliberately went easy on the cult surrounding the number 23, for example, and left a bunch of numerology and religious interpretations for somebody else to ponder. That’s another book all by itself.
  • When I started the book, 17 had the edge. First of all, “At 17” by Janis Ian is probably my favorite song of all time. It came out in 1975, which was my favorite music year of all time. (Perhaps I should have written it in 1975.) But 17 is famous in mathematics for Carl Friedrich Gauss’s famous straightedge-and-compass construction of a regular 17-gon, for the 17 “wallpaper” symmetries of the plane, and for the fact that if you connect 17 suitably spaced dots with a segment of red, blue, or green, you will automatically create a “monochromatic” triangle whose three vertices are among the original 17 dots. And nobody has yet created a solvable Sudoku puzzle with fewer than 17 original entries. How about that?
  • But by the time I finished Number Freak, my favorite number had become 36. What happened is that while doing research for the book I came across a conjecture from the 18th century called the 36 Officer Problem. I had never heard of it before (yet another example!), perhaps because the problem was resolved in the early 20th century and then ceased to be of interest. But there was a three-dimensional wrinkle to the problem that hadn’t been explored, and I used that wrinkle to design a puzzle with a gray base and 36 towers of various colors. I went to Toy Fair and showed the puzzle to ThinkFun, a great game and puzzle company out of Alexandria, Virginia. And guess what? They made me a deal for the puzzle and after a year tinkering with the basic model, they launched it as “36 Cube” in the fall of 2008—many months before Number Freak came out! I was thrilled that the lessons of the book came to life in such a tangible way, so I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that 36 holds a very special place in my heart.

This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 22 Oct 2009, by gialloporpora.

  • 22 Oct 09
    gialloporpora
    gialloporpora

    In this interview we sit down with author and mathematician Derrick Niederman to discuss his engaging, recently published book about the first two hundred natural numbers, ‘Number Freak: From 1 to 200, The Hidden Language of Numbers Revealed’.

    math interview people

    • Other than that, I deliberately went easy on the cult surrounding the number 23, for example, and left a bunch of numerology and religious interpretations for somebody else to ponder. That’s another book all by itself.
    • When I started the book, 17 had the edge. First of all, “At 17” by Janis Ian is probably my favorite song of all time. It came out in 1975, which was my favorite music year of all time. (Perhaps I should have written it in 1975.) But 17 is famous in mathematics for Carl Friedrich Gauss’s famous straightedge-and-compass construction of a regular 17-gon, for the 17 “wallpaper” symmetries of the plane, and for the fact that if you connect 17 suitably spaced dots with a segment of red, blue, or green, you will automatically create a “monochromatic” triangle whose three vertices are among the original 17 dots. And nobody has yet created a solvable Sudoku puzzle with fewer than 17 original entries. How about that?
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