Today is Shawna’s birthday, and I was reminded, as I am every time someone celebrates a birthday, of a problem my high school physics teacher posed to us when asked about his age:
Last year my age was a perfect square. Next year my age will be a perfect cube.
In fact, his age was the only solution to that problem.
I wondered if I could come up with such a description of my own age (Shawna’s too, but I’m not going to share that one). I wanted the description to be unique in some sense, and the best I could come up with was a minimal solution:
My age is prime, the sum of two consecutive composite integers, won’t be prime again for six years (sexy primes!), and is the smallest such age.
Does anyone else have a cool way of describing their age? (Note the implication about my own description.)
360 
December 31, 2007 at 11:53 am |
Happy Birthday Batwoman!
Every time I think of cool way to describe my own age I realize it’s not unique…I’ll have to keep working on it.
January 2, 2008 at 6:26 pm |
When I was your age, I described it as the last time my age would fit in x bits binary. I’m 3/4 the way from that age to filling x+1 bits.
February 8, 2008 at 10:07 am |
[…] the classification of all finite simple groups, and 26 letters in the English alphabet. 26 is the only number directly between a square and a cube (proved by Fermat), and it is the smallest number which is not […]