Is there anything as quintessentially British as a pub quiz?
It's a tradition that we hold sacred as a nation and nothing feels quite as disheartening than when we think our team has got it in the bag only to have it taken away from us at the last minute as we stumble over a tie-breaker question.
Maths-themed questions frequently populate pub quiz papers and to save you from a rather untimely elimination, we have gathered ten of the best mathematical facts to see you sail smoothly through the rounds.
Some are unbelievable, some are comical and some are down right mind-blowing if we do say so ourselves.
Buckle up and allow us to bestow some knowledge on you, just think of us when you win your next free round and pork scratchings.
1. There are actually only 17 possible designs of wallpaper pattern
According to the underlying symmetry in wallpaper patterns, mathematicians have demonstrated that there are only this specific number of possibilities.
Colours and decoration can of course vary but there is still only 17 possible symmetries.
2. The French word for pie chart is 'camembert'
Very possibly one of our favourite facts - the circular graph possesses different names across the world, ‘camembert’ in France and ‘flatbread chart' in China - who knew.
3. It’s possible to cut a cake into eight slices using only three cuts
You do this by making two cuts in a vertical plane and one in a horizontal plane - mind blown!
4. You can take any four digit number, follow these steps and you will end up with 6174
- Choose a four digit number (the only condition being that is has to have at least two different digits)
- Arrange the digits of the four digit number in descending and then ascending order
- Subtract the smaller number from the bigger one
- Repeat and eventually you'll finish with 6174, which is known as Kaprekar's constant. If you then repeat the process you'll repeatedly get 6174 over and over again
5. A US Navy Warship was once out of action after dividing by zero
In 1997, a crew member onboard the USS Yorktown accidentally entered a zero into one of the computers on the ship. This resulted in the ship’s software dividing by zero, meaning that it was stranded and unable to move for over two hours.
6. The number 0.999999….. is exactly equal to 1
The proof: Let x=0.9999…
Then 10x = 9.9999…
10x-x =(9.9999…)-(0.9999…)
9x=9
x=1
7. William Shanks calculated pi to an impressive 707 decimal places but made a mistake on the 528th digit
William Shanks, amateur mathematician, spent a large proportion of his life calculating mathematical constants by hand. Shanks however never knew of his mistake as it wasn’t revealed until after his death.
8. Seven is ‘arithmetically unique’
It is the only number with a value below 10 that you can't multiply or divide and keep within the group. If you take 5 for example, you can multiply by 2 to get 10 (still within the 1-10 group), 6 and 8 you can divide by 2.
9. The numbers on opposite sides of a die will always add up to seven
On a die, the numbers 1,2 and 3 all share a vertex. If these three numbers run clockwise round this vertex then the die is called left-handed and if the three numbers run anti-clockwise round the vertex, then it is deemed a right-handed die.
Chinese dice are normally left-handed and Western dice are normally right-handed.
10. If you multiply six by an even number, the answer will always end with the same digit
The number in the ten’s place will be half of the number in the one’s place.
