Number numbness, part 1

(Title taken from one of my favourite Douglas Hofstadter essays. Look him up if the name is new to you. Worth it.)

You might have seen a little gem of a fact circulating in the last couple of days, to the effect that 2011 is a Very Special Year. Not only is 2011 a prime number, but it can also be written as the sum of ELEVEN CONSECUTIVE prime numbers. And if you, erm, take 2000 away from 2011, you get ELEVEN too. And if you lie directly under my back hedge at 11.11pm on the 11th of the 11th after having drunk 11 cans of cider, you can see precisely 11 stars through a gap in the branches. Probably.

Patterns. We love the buggers. And we love feeling Very Special. So it’s perfectly human to seize on number sequences like this and give ourselves a little frisson.

But as the analysis from Dan Harrison shows, there’s nothing that unusual about these sequences. Prime numbers are like potatoes; lumpy and in different sizes. If you take them out of their bag and line them up in strict order of size, it shouldn’t be too surprising that you can make up a wide range of total weights if you’re allowed to start and end the range that you select wherever you like. You can even make the same total in more than one way. This is addition, not factorisation.

The entertaining bit for me is watching the Woooo Yeahhhhh Special Year information being amplified around the world, while the quiet voice of rationality, erm, isn’t. Probably. Ever thus, of course, as we know from the Pugwash Effect and so on.

Yes, 2011 is a special year. But it’s a special year because it’s the one that you, yes YOU, are most likely to be able to make a difference in. Not because of any numerical or planetary alignment. So get out there and get on with it!

Happy New Year.