Leaping into 2016

The worst thing about taking a long hiatus from a blog is all the spam.

That aside, I’m back, and looking forward to a big year. It’s always nice when the chess and regular olympics coincide, and in a leap year no less. I was trying to find something more mathematically special about the number 2016 than the simple fact that we get an extra day in a few weeks. I struggled. It looks similar to the supremely addictive “2048” game (click the link at your peril – hours will be wasted!). But it’s not. The best I could come up with was that if you add its square to its cube, you get a number that contains every digit from 0 to 9 exactly once. Hardly dinner-party conversation.  [EDIT:  We can do better. Get your math geek on below.]

So instead, I’m finishing my Triple J Hottest 100 votes. Forthcoming.

Happy 2016!

(…turns out 2016 is quite cool after all. It’s triangular: 1+2+3+…+63=2016. And if you take the square root of the triangle of these cubes, √(1³ + 2³ + 3³ + • • • +63³), we’re also back in 2016-land. But the coolest is probably its binary representation:  2016 = 11111100000)