{"id":40,"date":"2007-12-28T17:49:51","date_gmt":"2007-12-28T16:49:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=40"},"modified":"2008-01-08T13:42:32","modified_gmt":"2008-01-08T12:42:32","slug":"what-is-interesting-about-the-number-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=40","title":{"rendered":"What is interesting about the number 2008?"},"content":{"rendered":"

While tidying up the attic I came across my copy of the 2nd edition of The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers<\/a> by David Wells – it’s at the 4th edition now so an update of my library is well overdue. I love this book and have wasted many an hour flicking through it’s pages – which is why my attic is still such a mess. Since it is almost 2008 I wondered if there were any interesting facts about the number 2008 and moved to the relevant section in the book – nothing! The last year before 2008 that was listed was 1980:<\/p>\n

“1980-0891=1089 which is one of only 5 patterns in which subtracting a 4 digit number from its reversal leaves the digits rearranged.”<\/p>\n

The next entry was 2025 which implies that we have a lot of rather dull years ahead – (only numerically speaking I hope). Of course, as everyone knows, there is no such thing as an uninteresting number (check out the wikipedia page for The Interesting Number Paradox<\/a> to find a “proof”) and so I embarked on a search to find out why the number 2008 was interesting (to me at least).<\/p>\n

I failed! Here is the best I could do (thanks to this site<\/a>):<\/p>\n

2008 is a Kaprekar constant<\/a> in base 3<\/p>\n

So there you have it – 2008 is a boring number and to make things worse my attic is still untidy. Someone out there please try and prove me wrong – find something interesting about this number and let me know in the comments. If it passes my own personal test of ‘interestingness’ (loosely defined as anything that makes me say “thats cool”) then I will update this page with the results<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have had a few great responses to this post most of which can be found in the comments section. My favourites are:<\/p>\n

2008 is a Happy Number<\/a><\/p>\n

There are exactly 1000 numbers less than 2008 that share no factors in common with 2008. That is, Euler\u2019s totient function phi(2008) = 1000 (check here<\/a>.) Would it be correct to say that 2008 is the beginning of the next Euler totient millenium then?<\/p>\n

2008 is the prime number 251 multiplied by the sum its own digits.<\/p>\n

Update 2 (Jan 8th 2008)<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have just discovered another blog post that has some fun facts about 2008 over at 360<\/a> – my favorite of which is<\/p>\n

2008 can be written as the sum of of 16 consecutive positive integers: 118+119+120+\u2026+132+133<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While tidying up the attic I came across my copy of the 2nd edition of The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers by David Wells – it’s at the 4th edition now so an update of my library is well overdue. I love this book and have wasted many an hour flicking through it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-math"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}