mathematics

According to “What’s Special About This Number?”,

1414 is the smallest number whose square contains 3 consecutive 9’s.

The square is 1,999,396. I like how the last three digits are also multiples of three.

Thanks to NumberGossip.com I find that 1414 is:

• Even (of course)
• Composite
• Deficient
• Odious
• Square-free
• Undulating

1414 is apparently both a triangular number and the smallest triangular number with four digits. It is also the Decimal expansion of sqrt(2) truncated and rounded to 4 places. There are many other mathematically esoteric aspects of 1414 if you care to check them out.

On my bike commute home on Friday, a question struck me out of nowhere: how far into Pi does 1414 appear? This was after about an hour of heat and sweat, so that might have something to do with it. ;)

Anyhow, thanks to The Pi-Search Page, I now know that:

The string 1414 occurs at position 1,636 counting from the first digit after the decimal point.

The next one is at position 12,432, and so forth.

“The clock that solved the Longitude Problem” by Adrian Hon

The art of longitude

Ethan Zuckerman posted “Clifford Ross is trying to find the longitude” today, a fascinating story of invention, time, and the art of longitude:

Clifford Ross is an artist who has found himself becoming an inventor. His talk, “Finding the Latitude - The Art of Invention, the Invention of Art”, begins with the history of the naval chronometer. Ross tells us his hero was John Harrison, who won the 20,000 pound ($20 million in current dollars) prize offered by King Charles the II in the 1714 Longitude Act.

“Greenwich Park LASER” by zimpenfish

Finding Time

Harrison was an uneducated carpenter who lived ourside of London. He built a grandfather clock entirely our of wood - for fun - in 1718, and took on the challege of the shipboard chronometer in 1730, completing his first clock - commonly called H1 - in 1735. It was an immense technical challenge - a clock that could keep time accurately on a moving ship, through extremes of temperature and humidity.

And this precious tidbit:

Ross notes that “finding the Longitude” became a catchphrase for the pursuits of fools and lunatics.