Have you noticed that mathematics has been taking over the calendar this month?This past Tuesday (March 3, 2009) was Square Root Day. What is Square Root Day? It’s “a rare holiday that occurs when the day and the month are both the square root of the last two digits of the current year.” The next Square Root Day won't happen until April 4, 2016, so I hope you got your celebrations in.
Also in March of this year, Addition Day (March 6th, 2009) where the digits of the day and month add up to the last two digits of the year (those are more common, we had one last month February 7th and we’ll have another on April 5th). March every year is also when we celebrate Pi day: March 14 (3.14 ... will this be a huge event in 2015?)
Anyway, if you’re mathematically minded, you probably already knew about all these dates. Maybe you’ll be interested in these books too:
Count Down: six kids vie for glory at the world's toughest math competition by Steve Olson
- Everything and More: a compact history of infinity by David Foster Wallace
- God Created the Integers: The mathematical breakthroughs that changed history by Stephen Hawking
- Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
- A History of PI by Petr Beckmann
- Poincare's Prize: the hundred-year quest to solve one of math's greatest puzzles by George G. Szpiro
- Symmetry: a journey into the patterns of nature by Marcus Du Sautoy
- The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-century letter that made the world modern by Keith Devlin
- Zero: the biography of a dangerous idea by Charles Seife
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