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Leigh Mercer
Leigh Mercer (1893–1977) was a noted British wordplay and recreational mathematics expert. Career Palindrome Mercer is best known for devising the palindrome " A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!".Published in ''Notes and Queries,'' 13 Nov. 1948, according to ''The Yale Book of Quotations,'' F. R. Shapiro, ed. (2006, ). Mathematical limerick The following mathematical limerick is attributed to him: : \frac + (5 \times 11) = 9^2+0 This is read as follows: : A dozen A dozen (commonly abbreviated doz or dz) is a grouping of twelve. The dozen may be one of the earliest primitive integer groupings, perhaps because there are approximately a dozen cycles of the Moon, or months, in a cycle of the Sun, or year ..., a gross, and a score : Plus three times the square root of four : Divided by seven : Plus five times eleven : Is nine squared and not a bit more. References {{DEFAULTSORT:Mercer, Leigh 1893 births 1977 deaths Recreational cryptographers Word games Word play ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British People
British people or Britons, also known colloquially as Brits, are the citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the British Overseas Territories, and the Crown dependencies.: British nationality law governs modern British citizenship and nationality, which can be acquired, for instance, by descent from British nationals. When used in a historical context, "British" or "Britons" can refer to the Ancient Britons, the indigenous inhabitants of Great Britain and Brittany, whose surviving members are the modern Welsh people, Cornish people, and Bretons. It also refers to citizens of the former British Empire, who settled in the country prior to 1973, and hold neither UK citizenship nor nationality. Though early assertions of being British date from the Late Middle Ages, the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707 triggered a sense of British national identity.. The notion of Britishness and a shared Brit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wordplay
Word play or wordplay (also: play-on-words) is a literary technique and a form of wit in which words used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement. Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names (such as in the play ''The Importance of Being Earnest'', ''Ernest'' being a given name that sounds exactly like the adjective ''earnest''). Word play is quite common in oral cultures as a method of reinforcing meaning. Examples of text-based ( orthographic) word play are found in languages with or without alphabet-based scripts, such as homophonic puns in Mandarin Chinese. Techniques Some techniques often used in word play include interpreting idioms literally and creating contradictions and redundancies, as in Tom Swifties: :"Hurry up and get to the back of the ship," Tom sai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Recreational Mathematics
Recreational mathematics is mathematics carried out for recreation (entertainment) rather than as a strictly research and application-based professional activity or as a part of a student's formal education. Although it is not necessarily limited to being an endeavor for amateurs, many topics in this field require no knowledge of advanced mathematics. Recreational mathematics involves mathematical puzzles and games, often appealing to children and untrained adults, inspiring their further study of the subject. The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) includes recreational mathematics as one of its seventeen Special Interest Groups, commenting: Mathematical competitions (such as those sponsored by mathematical associations) are also categorized under recreational mathematics. Topics Some of the more well-known topics in recreational mathematics are Rubik's Cubes, magic squares, fractals, logic puzzles and mathematical chess problems, but this area of mathematics incl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palindrome
A palindrome is a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of symbols that reads the same backwards as forwards, such as the words ''madam'' or ''racecar'', the date and time ''11/11/11 11:11,'' and the sentence: "A man, a plan, a canal – Panama". The 19-letter Finnish word ''saippuakivikauppias'' (a soapstone vendor), is the longest single-word palindrome in everyday use, while the 12-letter term ''tattarrattat'' (from James Joyce in ''Ulysses'') is the longest in English. The word ''palindrome'' was introduced by English poet and writer Henry Peacham in 1638.Henry Peacham, ''The Truth of our Times Revealed out of One Mans Experience'', 1638p. 123/ref> The concept of a palindrome can be dated to the 3rd-century BCE, although no examples survive; the first physical examples can be dated to the 1st-century CE with the Latin acrostic word square, the Sator Square (contains both word and sentence palindromes), and the 4th-century Greek Byzantine sentence palindrome ''nipson ano ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Dozen, A Gross, And A Score
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes''. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. In English grammar, " a", and its variant " an", are indefinite articles. History The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to distinguish it fro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mathematical Joke
A mathematical joke is a form of humor which relies on aspects of mathematics or a stereotype of mathematicians. The humor may come from a pun, or from a double meaning of a mathematical term, or from a lay person's misunderstanding of a mathematical concept. Mathematician and author John Allen Paulos in his book ''Mathematics and Humor'' described several ways that mathematics, generally considered a dry, formal activity, overlaps with humor, a loose, irreverent activity: both are forms of "intellectual play"; both have "logic, pattern, rules, structure"; and both are "economical and explicit". Some performers combine mathematics and jokes to entertain and/or teach math. Humor of mathematicians may be classified into the esoteric and exoteric categories. Esoteric jokes rely on the intrinsic knowledge of mathematics and its terminology. Exoteric jokes are intelligible to the outsiders, and most of them compare mathematicians with representatives of other disciplines or with commo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dozen
A dozen (commonly abbreviated doz or dz) is a grouping of twelve. The dozen may be one of the earliest primitive integer groupings, perhaps because there are approximately a dozen cycles of the Moon, or months, in a cycle of the Sun, or year. Twelve is convenient because it has a maximal number of divisors among the numbers up to its double, a property only true of 1, 2, 6, 12, 60, 360, and 2520. The use of twelve as a base number, known as the duodecimal system (also as ''dozenal''), originated in Mesopotamia (see also sexagesimal). Counting in base-12 can easily be accomplished on one's hands by counting each finger bone with one's thumb. Using this method, one hand can count to twelve, and two hands (with the second hand as a placeholder for representing units of twelve) can count to 144. Twelve dozen (122 = 144) are known as a gross; and twelve gross (123 = 1,728, the duodecimal 1,000) are called a great gross, a term most often used when shipping or buying items in bul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gross (unit)
In English and related languages, several terms involving the words "great" or "gross" relate to numbers involving a multiple of exponents of twelve (dozen): *A gross refers to a group of 144 items (a dozen dozen or a square dozen, 122). *A great gross refers to a group of 1728 items (a dozen gross or a cubic dozen, 123)... *A small gross or a great hundred refers to a group of 120 items (ten dozen, 10×12). The term can be abbreviated ''gr.'' or ''gro.'', and dates from the early 15th century. It derives from the Old French ''grosse douzaine'', meaning "large dozen”. The continued use of these terms in measurement and counting represents the duodecimal number system. This has led groups such as the Dozenal Society of America to advocate for wider use of "gross" and related terms instead of the decimal system.. See also * Long hundred The long hundred, also known as the great hundred or twelfty, is the number 120 (in base-10 Arabic numerals) that was referred to as "hun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
20 (number)
20 (twenty; Roman numeral XX) is the natural number following 19 and preceding 21. A group of twenty units may also be referred to as a score. In mathematics *20 is a pronic number. *20 is a tetrahedral number as 1, 4, 10, 20. *20 is the basis for vigesimal number systems. *20 is the third composite number to be the product of a squared prime and a prime, and also the second member of the (''2''2)''q'' family in this form. *20 is the smallest primitive abundant number. *An icosahedron has 20 faces. A dodecahedron has 20 vertices. *20 can be written as the sum of three Fibonacci numbers uniquely, i.e. 20 = 13 + 5 + 2. *20 is the number of moves (quarter or half turns) required to optimally solve a Rubik's Cube in the worst case. (e.g. the newspaper headline "Scores of Typhoon Survivors Flown to Manila")."CBS News"''Scores of Typhoon Survivors Flown to Manila'' (November 2013) In sports * Twenty20 is a form of limited overs cricket where each team plays only 20 overs. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1893 Births
Events January–March * January 2 – Webb C. Ball introduces railroad chronometers, which become the general railroad timepiece standards in North America. * Mark Twain started writing Puddn'head Wilson. * January 6 – The Washington National Cathedral is chartered by Congress; the charter is signed by President Benjamin Harrison. * January 13 ** The Independent Labour Party of the United Kingdom has its first meeting. ** U.S. Marines from the ''USS Boston'' land in Honolulu, Hawaii, to prevent the queen from abrogating the Bayonet Constitution. * January 15 – The ''Telefon Hírmondó'' service starts with around 60 subscribers, in Budapest. * January 17 – Overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii: Lorrin A. Thurston and the Citizen's Committee of Public Safety in Hawaii, with the intervention of the United States Marine Corps, overthrow the government of Queen Liliuokalani. * January 21 ** The Cherry Sisters first perform in Marion, Iowa. ** The T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1977 Deaths
Events January * January 8 – Three bombs explode in Moscow within 37 minutes, killing seven. The bombings are attributed to an Armenian separatist group. * January 10 – Mount Nyiragongo erupts in eastern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). * January 17 ** 49 marines from the and are killed as a result of a collision in Barcelona harbour, Spain. * January 18 ** Scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires' disease. ** Australia's worst railway disaster at Granville, a suburb of Sydney, leaves 83 people dead. ** SFR Yugoslavia Prime minister Džemal Bijedić, his wife and 6 others are killed in a plane crash in Bosnia and Herzegovina. * January 19 – An Ejército del Aire CASA C-207C Azor (registration T.7-15) plane crashes into the side of a mountain near Chiva, on approach to Valencia Airport in Spain, killing all 11 people on board. * January 20 – Jimmy Carter is sworn in as the 39th Preside ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
