The Number 42: Mathematical Peculiarities
February 7th, 2013Douglas Adams, perhaps, has provided the most significant use of the number 42 in his classic and very funny science fiction book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But James Grime, a mathematician with the University of Cambridge looks at various other ways in which the number 42 is noteworthy. Among other things, 42 is a pronic number, a Harshad number, and a primary, pseudoperfect number. Grime and his guests explain what those terms mean far better than we ever could.
