Math & Numbers Facts for Kids
Mind-bending number facts
No matter what shape of triangle you draw β tall, flat, big, or small β the three angles inside always add up to exactly 180 degrees.
The spirals on a pinecone almost always follow Fibonacci numbers. If you count the spirals going one way and then the other, you'll typically get two consecutive Fibonacci numbers like 8 and 13.
A tesseract is a four-dimensional analogue of a cube. Just as a cube is made of six squares, a tesseract is bounded by eight cubes β though it is impossible to visualise fully in our three-dimensional world.
A circle has 360 degrees because ancient Babylonians used a base-60 number system, and 360 is nicely divisible by many numbers (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12...).
Hypatia of Alexandria, who lived around 400 CE, was one of the first known female mathematicians. She taught philosophy and astronomy and was admired throughout the ancient world.
In the knight's tour puzzle, a chess knight must visit every square on the board exactly once. Mathematicians have found solutions for boards of many different sizes.
Zero is an even number because it can be divided by two with no remainder. Mathematicians classify it as even, not odd.
A googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name was invented by a nine-year-old boy named Milton Sirotta in 1920.
The Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13β¦) appears in nautilus shells and sunflower seed patterns in nature. Each number is the sum of the two before it.
There are infinitely many prime numbers, which was first proved by the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid around 300 BC. A prime number can only be divided evenly by 1 and itself.