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Comment by code_runner | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the significance of this at all other than its the coolest thing I've seen on HN in a while.

I couldn't be farther from a math nerd.... I avoided it as much as I could throughout school.... but things like that are just so interesting and weird. How on earth (and for what reason) did they find this out? The properties of this number are interesting enough but the process to discover it is just so crazy.

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Go read Lockhart's Lament. Maybe you actually do like math, but school is just terrible at teaching it.

I hated arithmetic (still do), but liked algebra, geometry, and calculus (forgotten most of it).

> I hated arithmetic …

That is to say, ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision.

I really enjoyed the Grapes of Math by Alex Bellos

I have a similar background with math as the commenter. +1 to Lockhart. If the commenter finds numbers interesting they may also really enjoy his book “Arithmatic.” I found it so refreshing. It truly reoriented my whole relationship with mathematics.

Also read Measurement, by the same author.

Could you recommend a book that makes math fun for kids? Like 8-10 years old.

At that age, I think it is less about the material used and more about how the parent, guardian, and similar figures approach the material. Are they telling the child, be it directly, indirectly, or just through body language, that math is fun and safe or boring and scary? Once they are older, kids will seek out their own peer circle for approval while also forming their own opinions and personal preferences, but at that young an age it is more about associating math with positivity and giving the child positive attention when they engage in math.

I had a sitdown in the sofa today with my seven year old boy talking about 6174 and how all those numbers end up there, as well as three digits with 495. I wrote a simple python sript that we could use to go through a lot of numbers to show this. We also talked about how many steps needed to reach those constants. Then we talked about if there were eight steps for any number and we improved the script further, but found none. Goodl talk and sofa-time ;-)

In a similar vein I got really hooked in school on Lychrel numbers => take a number x and reverse its digits to form y. Add x and y, repeat. Eventually this process leads to numbers that are palindromic (they are the same if you reverse their digits). Except some numbers like 196 do not seem to ever form a palindrome. No one knows if this is true or if the palindrome is so big that computers have yet to find it.

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