10 Facts about maths

If you were to play a word association game with a school-aged child, you’d be pretty unlikely to get a response of ‘cool’ when you asked them what word first came into their mind when you said ‘maths’. Despite what some people may tell you, maths is far from dull. On the contrary, there are plenty of fun and strange maths-related facts out there that will fascinate children of all ages. To prove this, we’ve compiled a list of 20 cool facts about maths which we encourage you to share with the children in your life.

1. The word “hundred” comes from the old Norse term, “hundrath”, which actually means 120 and not 100.

2. In a room of 23 people there’s a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday.

3. Most mathematical symbols weren’t invented until the 16th century. Before that, equations were written in words.

4. “Forty” is the only number that is spelt with letters arranged in alphabetical order.

5. Conversely, “one” is the only number that is spelt with letters arranged in descending order.

6. From 0 to 1000, the only number that has the letter “a” in it is “one thousand”.

7. ‘Four’ is the only number in the English language that is spelt with the same number of letters as the number itself.

8. Every odd number has an “e” in it.

9. The reason Americans call mathematics “math”, is because they argue that “mathematics” functions as a singular noun so ‘math’ should be singular too.

10. Markings on animal bones indicate that humans have been doing maths since around 30,000BC.