42 and Douglas Adams - Numberphile
Douglas Adams - who would have turned 60 on March 11 - immortalised the number 42 in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. More links & stuff in full description below ↓↓↓ Forty-two was...
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JAMES GRIME: OK, so 42 is maybe not such a special number in mathematics, but a very special number in nerd culture. PHIL MORIARTY: Good. Good, good, good. Did you want to do something with 42? JAMES GRIME: Yes. So you take a piece of paper. It's very thin. Let's fold this in half. Fold it in half again. Fold it in half again. Imagine you can keep doing this, and in reality you can't keep doing this. But imagine you can keep folding it in half, and each time you do, it will double in thickness. And if you fold it 42 times, that's enough to reach from the Earth to the moon. You notice when 42 turns up, you keep noticing it. But that's not really all that remarkable, since any two digit number will turn up one hundredth of t...
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JAMES GRIME: OK, so 42 is maybe not such a special number in mathematics, but a very special number in nerd culture. PHIL MORIARTY: Good. Good, good, good. Did you want to do something with 42? JAMES GRIME: Yes. So you take a piece of paper. It's very thin. Let's fold this in half. Fold it in half again. Fold it in half again. Imagine you can keep doing this, and in reality you can't keep doing this. But imagine you can keep folding it in half, and each time you do, it will double in thickness. And if you fold it 42 times, that's enough to reach from the Earth to the moon. You notice when 42 turns up, you keep noticing it. But that's not really all that remarkable, since any two digit number will turn up one hundredth of t...
