, Columnist
This Was a Great Year to Be a Math Geek
And 2019 is shaping up to be pretty good, too.
Fun and games.
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For math geeks like me, 2018 was a banner year: not only was it a year in which the field’s top prize was awarded, it was the only year in this century featuring days lining up with both the Golden ratio, an elegant proportion found throughout art and nature, and the mathematical constant e, which is at the core of calculus.
But the mathematician in me also can’t help but note that the number 2,018 has some ominous properties: It’s deficient, meaning that the sum of all its positive divisors is less than itself. And it’s also odious, meaning that it has an odd number of ones in its binary expansion, 11111100010.1