Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Interesting Properties

Post 1001. The number 1001 has several interesting properties that make it one of my favorites. I'll give hints until someone gets the main one.

5 comments:

Erin said...

As an English teacher, I immediately think of 1001 Arabian Nights as well as the fact that it's a palindrome. It's also the product of 3 consecutive prime numbers (7, 11, and 13).

See, I did show up for some of my college math classes!

Assistant Village Idiot said...

It's that 7, 11, 13 that I was looking for. Those of us who like factoring numbers in our head like the shortcut it occasionally gives us on factoring 7007, or 25,025, or 362,362.

Most excellent.

It is not only palindromic, but the same upside down, or upside down and reversed.

I don't know if any of this was present in the minds of the Arabs - using arabic numerals - when they compiled the 1001 Nights, though. In O. Henry's version, Scheherazade gets executed after story 288.

Anonymous said...

The title of the original translation/compilation was, IIRC, One Thousand Nights and A Night.

My first thought was that the significance was binary in basis.

Anonymous said...

O. Henry did prefer short(er) stories.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

No, Erin got the main numeric property. As for Scheherazade, in O. Henry's story she told the Caliph she could not tell story 288 because it was too gross, and he had her executed, because he couldn't abide puns.