Math & Numbers Facts for Kids
Mind-bending number facts
The golden ratio, approximately 1.618, appears everywhere in nature β from the spiral of a nautilus shell to the arrangement of petals in a flower.
The field of graph theory began in 1736 when Leonhard Euler proved it was impossible to walk across all seven bridges of KΓΆnigsberg exactly once and return to the start.
Numbers like 121, 1331, and 12321 are palindromes β they read the same forwards and backwards, like a mirror!
The number of possible chess games is estimated to be around 10 to the power of 120 β far more than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
If you keep adding Β½ + ΒΌ + β + 1/16 and so on forever, the total gets closer and closer to 1 but never quite reaches it β unless you add infinitely many terms, in which case it equals exactly 1.
Hexagons are one of only three regular shapes that can tile a flat surface with no gaps or overlaps β the other two are squares and equilateral triangles.
The abacus was used for calculations before written number systems even existed. Some versions are over 4,000 years old.
There are exactly five regular three-dimensional solids (Platonic solids): the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. Mathematicians proved thousands of years ago that no others exist.
If you multiply any whole number by 9 and then add the digits of the result together (repeating if needed), you always get 9. Try it: 9 Γ 7 = 63 β 6 + 3 = 9.
If you add two even numbers together, you always get another even number. And if you add two odd numbers together, you also get an even number!