Counting

[The Orange One]

There are a number of famous people to attend Cambridge, and a number of famous people attend its sister college Oxford as well. One person who was lucky enough to attend both was the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who published the first ever book printed in English to cover Algebra. Its name was 'The Grounde of Artes, teaching the Worke and Practise of Arithmeticke, both in whole numbers and fractions', and it was published in 1543.

Other things Robert Recorde did include:

- inventing the equals sign, =
- bringing the plus and minus signs to England, + and -
- coining the word ZENZIZENZIZENZIC, although his spelling was "zenzizenzizenzike", and it "doeth represent the square of squares squaredly". In today's terms, the zenzizenzizenzic of a number is its eighth power (e.g. the zenzizenzizenzic of 2 is 256).

[DrainBrain]

Did someone mention squares?

Mark the centre points of the squares on a chessboard. Among these 64 points there are 1544 sets of three collinear points.

Ref: http://oeis.org/A000938

[RobbieM]

Did somebody mention points?

Then let's combine points, DrainBrain and TubeForum altogether, as you admire the All Points 28-1545 Drain Tube for Ice Machine!!

[The Orange One]

Did somebody mention ice?

If you don't want to make your ice, you could go and get it from a place where it is already frozen, like the Moon. Also on the moon is the Tycho Crater, named after Tycho Brahe, who was born in 1546.

[RobbieM]

Did someone mention craters on the moon?

There's a Henry Crater on the moon! There were also a number kings of England called Henry. The most infamous was Henry VIII, who died in 1547.

[GuyBarry]

Did someone mention "eighth"? Eighth is twice fourth - which naturally brings us to Forth 2, broadcasting to Edinburgh, the Lothians and Fife on 1548 kHz medium wave.

[That's a "chain" of thirteen so far. How long can we keep it up for?]

[DrainBrain]

From one river: the Forth, to another river: the Hudson.

US Airways Flight 1549 ditched into the Hudson river on 15 January 2009 after striking a flock of Canada geese during its initial climb. Miraculously, all the passengers and flight crew escaped.

[RobbieM]

Did someone mention geese? Pesky things, getting in the way of climbing planes. I wonder if these geese first hatched out in a 1550 Cabinet Hatcher, (like you'll find if you scroll down on the linked page).

[GuyBarry]

Did someone mention "Hatch"? And aeroplanes? And Henry VIII?

Sir John Wright was a member of the English gentry who worked closely with King Henry VIII. He was also an ancestor of the famous Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, who built the world's first successful aeroplane. He died at age 63 on 5 October 1551 at Dagenham Manor, at Kelvedon Hatch, Essex.

Coincidence, or something more spooky?

[RobbieM]

Spooky, I'd say! Particularly as, when it comes to flying, I learnt to make one of my favourite paper aeroplanes whilst at Hutton Grammar School.

"Déjà vu?" you ask. Yes, that's because I mentioned my school a few posts back. The school was endowed in 1517 ... but was actually founded in 1552.

[DrainBrain]

Moving smoothly from aeroplanes to wings...

Palindromic Wing Primes are numbers that are primes, palindromic in base 10, and consisting of one central digit surrounded by two wings having an equal amount of identical digits and different from the central one.

One sequence of such starts:

313
3331333
333333313333333

and the 11th prime in this sequence has 1553 digits, i.e. 776 3s followed by 1 followed by 776 3s

[GuyBarry]

You can find Cora's Best Chicken Wings at 1554 University Avenue West, St Paul, Minnesota.

[RobbieM]

...and delicious Chicken Goujons for £5.95 at the Inn on the Loch in Lanark. The STD code for Lanark ends 1555.

[DrainBrain]

Wait, what? Another Inn on the Loch?

This one offers accommodation and fishing as well as a restaurant and is in Dumfries where they have an STD code ending in 1556.

(Spooky coincidence for .co.uk versus .com)

[GuyBarry]

Big Fish Eat Little Fish is a 1557 engraving by Pieter van der Heyden after a drawing by Pieter Bruegel, currently in the British Museum.