A British mathematician decided to discover the world’s favourite number!
Alex Bellos put a questionnaire on the Intenet and more than 40,000 people responded. Alex wasn’t surprised. He thinks people have an emotional connection to numbers. ‘People always ask me my favourite number’, he says. More than half of people voted for a number between one and ten. Those are perhaps the most ‘human’ numbers since we have ten fingers and ten toes?
And the winner is …
But one number was much more popular than the others: seven. It’s a number that is important in many cultures. There are seven days in a week. We say there are seven seas. Snow White has seven dwarves… It’s also a prime number (that can only be divided by one and itself).
What is your favourite number? We asked some teenagers for theirs:
David: 8 - because it’s my birthday, and it rhymes with a lot of things. And it is one digit and an even number. Or pi (Π). Pi is an interesting number. It’s infinite.
Max: 8 - because it’s a nice and round shape.
Cléa: 4 - maybe because when you find a four-leafed clover it’s lucky.
Eloise: 16 - because when I was little I always wanted to be 16. I don’t want to anymore, but it’s still my favourite number.
Silvia: 3 - because it’s in the Fibonacci sequence and it’s a triangular number. The Fibonacci sequence starts with one, then you keep adding the previous number. So it goes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…
Clément: 0 - because it’s interesting.
Amélie: 27 - lots of stars died at the age of 27 – it’s a mythical age.
Maëlle: 7 – because everything cool that happens to me happens on the seventh.
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What’s your favourite number? ( recorded by
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Corrected Textmore↓A British mathematician decided to discover the world’s favourite number!
Alex Bellos put a questionnaire on the internet and more than 40,000 people responded. Alex wasn’t surprised. He thinks people have an emotional connection to numbers. ‘People always ask me my favourite number’, he says. More than half of people voted for a number between one and ten. Those are perhaps the most ‘human’ numbers since we have ten fingers and ten toes?
And the winner is …
But one number was much more popular than the others: seven. It’s a number that is important in many cultures. There are seven days in a week. We say there are seven seas. Snow White has seven dwarves… It’s also a prime number (that can only be divided by one and itself).
What is your favourite number? We asked some teenagers for theirs:
David: 8 - because it’s my birthday, and it rhymes with a lot of things. And it is one digit and an even number. Or pi (Π). Pi is an interesting number. It’s infinite.
Max: 8 - because it’s a nice and round shape.
Cléa: 4 - maybe because when you find a four-leafed clover it’s lucky.
Eloise: 16 - because when I was little I always wanted to be 16. I don’t want to anymore, but it’s still my favourite number.
Silvia: 3 - because it’s in the Fibonacci sequence and it’s a triangular number. The Fibonacci sequence starts with one, then you keep adding the previous number. So it goes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…
Clément: 0 - because it’s interesting.
Amélie: 27 - lots of stars died at the age of 27 – it’s a mythical age.
Maëlle: 7 – because everything cool that happens to me happens on the seventh.
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