Maths is a funny old thing, one minute you think you’ve finally nailed calculus and then the concepts of infinity and prime numbers turn your brain into mush. But for teenager Agniijo Banerjee, whose IQ at the age of 13 was already in excess of 162, these sorts of mathematical mind-bogglers are just water off a duck’s back.
Together with his tutor and science writer David Darling, they have written a new book, Weird Maths: At the Edge of Infinity and Beyond (£12.99, Oneworld), exploring some of the most puzzling conundrums, complex paradoxes and surprising solutions in mathematics. Here are a few unusual maths facts from the book.
Ham sandwich theorem
There’s a theorem that says it’s always possible to make a cut through a ham and cheese sandwich so that the two halves have exactly equal amounts of bread, ham, and cheese. The ingredients can be any shape you like, and can even be in different places – say, the bread in the bread-bin, the cheese in the fridge, and the ham on the counter. They could even be scattered across the Galaxy.
The Ham Sandwich theorem holds every time. A slice can made – or a plane drawn – that equally divides the bread, ham, and cheese. The theorem even holds in higher dimensions. In five dimensions, for instance, five objects, whatever their shape and position, could always be bisected with a single slice.
The biggest number of all
The biggest lawsuit ever filed, by a New York man who claimed he was bitten by a rabid dog, was for two trillion trillion trillion dollars – far more money than there is on Earth.
Mathematicians are used to dealing with vastly larger numbers. Some are so huge that there isn’t enough space in the known Universe to write them down, even if each digit were as small as an atom. Yet none of these unimaginably vast numbers are any closer to infinity than the numbers with which we first learn to count.
A new Grand Master
The last time anyone beat the top chess computer in the world was 2005. Since then chess computers have become so powerful that it’s almost certain no one will ever beat them again.
The highest rating ever achieved by a human is 2,882 by current world champion Magnus Carlsen in 2014. This is far below the ratings of the strongest chess engines, which are more than 3,400.
Meanwhile computers are begin to surpass humans at a far more complex game – Go. In 2017 AlphaGo defeated the current world number one, Ke Jie, in three games out of three.
The greatest unsolved problem in maths is the Riemann Hypothesis, which has to do with the distribution of prime numbers.
These numbers – ones that will only divide by themselves and 1 – are equivalent to the atoms from which maths is built. They’re hugely important but not well understood. Most mysteriously, although they seem to crop up at random, collectively, they follow certain patterns.
The Riemann Hypothesis, if proved true, effectively says that although it’s uncertain where prime numbers will spring up, this uncertainty is as well controlled as it could possibly be. It would give the best possible answer that mathematicians can ever hope for to the question: Given any number N, how many primes are there that are smaller than N?
The great German mathematician David Hilbert said that the first thing he would ask on waking from a sleep lasting at thousand years would be: “Is the Riemann Hypothesis established yet”? A $1 million prize has been offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute to the first person who can supply a proof.
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