Doing sleight of hand with numbers

In these days of torrijas and intelligent equations, as the poet Diego Medrano would say, it is necessary to remember that there is a magic in numbers that reaches the fingers and whose Latin-rooted etymology borders on sleight of hand (

prestus digitus

) and sleight of hand.

Our colleague Carlo Frabetti knows a lot about these things. Anyone who follows his articles will realize that numbers hold secrets that shape our lives. [Read the articles written by Carlo Frabetti here]. Without going any further, following Carlo Frabetti's guidelines, we can fuel our imagination and give life to our neurons by playing 1089.

To do this, you just need to think of any number that has three digits, the one that makes you the most angry; For example, I chose 579, but any other will also work. Well, we take 579 and turn it around, that is, we convert it into 975, a figure that, in turn, we are going to use to subtract the original number again, 579, resulting in 396. We take this figure and we add it to that same figure, but turned around, that is, we add 396 to 693. The result is the number 1089, which will appear whenever we follow these steps with any other three-digit number. And our numbering system known as the decimal positional notation system lends itself to these things.

It is called “positional notation”, because the same digit can represent a different value depending on its position, and it is called decimal, because 10 is the base of its system. But why 10 and not another number. Very easy: because there are ten fingers on our hands and keeping accounts with them is the easiest way to list things for the first time. However, and continuing with the hands, some cultures opted for other numerical bases. For example, the Sumerians used the number 60 as a base, as they counted the joints of the four fingers of the right hand, except for the thumb, which served as a pointer. In this way we have 3 joints for 4 fingers, that is: 12. Following this account, the other hand, the entire left one with its five fingers, served to accumulate groups of five dozen, which results in 60.

More information

In the blind labyrinth of an encrypted world

These sleights of hand, and their anthropological study, are things we can learn from reading mathematical biology professor Kit Yates, whose job is to discover the mathematical truths found in our reality. In his book titled

The Numbers of Life

(Blackie), he begins by teaching us how to count the snails that are hiding in his garden and ends with a critique of an article published in

The Lancet

, the prestigious medical journal. In the aforementioned article he used a surprisingly small group - twelve children - to criminalize the MMR vaccine in 1998.

In short, it is a curious book that teaches us how mathematics has shaped our history and that numbers and their combinations underlie everything we see, from the clouds to the complex equation contained in a torrija whose result will always be: ∞ (infinite).

The stone ax

It is a section where 

Montero Glez

, with a desire for prose, exercises his particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.

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