Tom R

Multiply 142857 by 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 and it rearranges its own digits every time. Multiply it by 7 and it collapses into six nines. A properly shuffled deck of cards has almost certainly never been in that order before in history. The equals sign was invented by someone who was tired of writing.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was 8 years old when he added every number from 1 to 100 in his head in roughly thirty seconds. Nine, for its part, has been performing the same trick in every multiplication table since the beginning of arithmetic.

Multiply 11 by itself and you get a palindrome. Keep going with 111, 1111, 11111 and the palindromes build into perfect number pyramids. Bees, separately, solved the most efficient geometry problem in nature millions of years before any mathematician could prove they'd done it.