Tom R

A million seconds ago was eleven days ago. A billion seconds ago was 1992. Sonic was new, the web had just opened to the public, the first text message had not been sent yet. The words sound like the same category of big. The numbers are not even in the same country.

The digit 8 is three different numbers depending on how you slice it. The 9 times table doesn't just repeat. It builds perfect number pyramids. And spiders are doing geometry in the dark that humans needed centuries of maths to describe.

Counting to a million out loud, one number per second, would take 23 days without stopping. Counting to a billion would take 31 years. Two is the only even prime number in existence. Forty is the only number in English whose letters appear in alphabetical order.

Sunflower seeds arrange themselves in Fibonacci spirals without knowing what a Fibonacci number is. Multiply 21,978 by 4 and read the answer backwards. And 0.999... repeating is mathematically equal to 1. This last one has started more arguments than almost anything else in mathematics.