The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life
Summary and excerpts
Every number tells a story
Jerry Newport. Movie Mozart and the Whale.
People have been attribute meaning to numbers across history and culture. Odd numbers are “strong” and more “spiritual”.
Terence Hines of Pace University showed that it takes more time for people to identify odd numbers. The experiment by James Wilkie and Galen Bodenhausen showed that baby pictures, when paired with odd numbers, tend to be considered boys. Are these experiment replicated?
7 Up, KFC 11 pieces, 501, Space Odyssey 2001. They all make use of a number that sticks out. These numbers are intentionally identified and applied in products.
.99 makes things cheaper, and that means expensive restaurants will not use them in price. Not using dollar sign, not aligning numbers with each other also make expensive prices hide under the radar.
The German judge study shows that even a random number from a dice roll can anchor how judges sentence.
142857 is the “phoenix number”. The first six multiples are well-ordered numerical anagrams of itself and the seventh is 999999.
Why 7? It sticks out because it’s the only number <10 that cannot be produced by or produce any other numbers.
Dan King and Chris Janiszewski drew ‘heat maps’ using people’s response to the questions like most liked numbers or ‘heaviest’ numbers, and so on. The heat map either avoids prime numbers (“liked”, “good”) or catches them (“excitable”, “think of a number”).