Centenary

This really is our one hundredth blogpost. What started as (and, as you will soon see, with) a joke has now officially become a collection of 100 reflections, rants and rhetorical ramblings. Apart from the embedded pictures and youtube video's, this amounts to more or less 200 kilobytes of information.

And yet, we have chosen to wait with the fuzz until we reach number 111. The question is of course: why? First of all, despite the fact that people celebrating anniversaries seem to have a natural liking towards multiples of five, any number is interesting. This can even be proved mathematically. For when do we call a number interesting?

Or just skip the number, and let's talk people instead: when do we say someone is interesting? When they have this one particular property that sets them apart from the others, right? Some sort of characterization that renders them unique. Well, the same thing applies to numbers. Two for example, is an interesting number, as this is the only even prime number. Which - pun alert - makes it the oddest one amongst the prime numbers...

Suppose now there exist numbers which are not interesting. Or downright boring, to make it worse. Wouldn't it then be quite interesting for a number to be called the first boring number? Agreed, it doesn't sound as nice as being a perfect number (like 6, because it is the sum of its own proper divisors, since 6 = 1 + 2 + 3), but it would still be a pretty interesting property. However, this very argument undermines the concept of being a boring number. Which therefore means that any number is interesting.

There are even websites and books listing numbers, and the reason why they are interesting. Here's a nice example. And it explains why we choose the number 111, as this is the smallest possible magic constant of a (3x3)-magic square containing distinct primes. And if that doesn't ring a bell, nevermind: only eleven to go...