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neuroman9999

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have any of your guys heard of the movie called ""Number 23"" with Jim Carrey? It's been a while since I've seen it, but from what I remember, in the movie he was obsessed with the number for its mysteriousness or something.
 

The_Doc_Man

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Have to admit I missed that one. But then, Jim Carrey is hit-or-miss with me.
 

neuroman9999

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he's always a hit or miss. some of his stuff is good, some is bad. I have a few of his films within my 850+ movie file collection. LIAR LIAR being one of them. I thought he played a great family man in that film.
 

The_Doc_Man

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I enjoyed him in Bruce Almighty and The Mask but he was totally over the top in the Batman and Robin film. That latter case is really saying a lot because the whole "Batman and Robin" franchise was played strictly a la' camp until the Christian Bale versions showed up.
 

Galaxiom

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42 is not a particularly significant number mathematically.

However some numbers are very special, especially those that are integers and 42 just missed two them. 41, from Euler's prime generating polynomial, and 43, which is one of the eight Heegner numbers 1, 2, 3, 7, 11, 19, 43, 67, 163. The Fibonacci Numbers are better known but they are an infinite sequence. The Heegner Numbers are a small finite set which make them very special.

The first couple of Heegner Numbers are considered trivial. The last three participate in an interesting expression that includes three irrational expressions but whose results are incredibly close to being integers, especially with 163.

The ratio of the diameter of a circle to its radius (Pi) is an irrational number (no patterns in the sequence of digits), as are most square roots. The Natural Number (e) is the irrational number where the log to the base of the Natural Number is itself.
Code:
 log(e) = e
.
Yet the Natural Number raised to the square root of the product of any of these three numbers and pi is almost an integer, in the case of 163, to twelve decimal places.

The reasons for this are not mathematical accidents. They are fundamentally related to the Golden Ratio. This unique irrational number is x where
Code:
x^2 - x = 1
 

The_Doc_Man

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And of course we cannot forget that 42 was actually the answer to the previous question, not the answer to the meaning of life. See, the input and output queues had become desynchronized.
 

Uncle Gizmo

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The 2 previous posts explained in a YouTube by Stephen Fry:-

 

NauticalGent

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This topic came up in today's DEVCON. I found this:

 

Mike Krailo

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I did a search on a few of the mentioned numbers in the venerable Pi constant. 42 is the clear winner except when referring to our 42'nd president :(

The string 41 occurs 2,002,247 times in the first 200M digits of Pi.
The string 42 occurs 2,000,419 times in the first 200M digits of Pi.
The string 43 occurs 1,998,493 times in the first 200M digits of Pi.

Also, Bill Clinton was our 42'nd president over here in the USA.
 

The_Doc_Man

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The ultimate icing on the cake is that not only were Deep Thought's input and output queues out of phase, but 42 was the answer to the prior question, which was "what is 8 x 7?"
 

Uncle Gizmo

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So what are you saying Richard, 42 was the wrong answer?

And is that an irony placed in the story ..

An aside:- Whenever I squeeze irony into a sentence I just can't help thinking of Captain carrot in the Terry pratchett discworld novels.....
 

The_Doc_Man

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Well, ... 42 was the answer that corresponded to the question that preceded "What is the meaning of life?" and that question was to be a simple operational test of Deep Thought. Rather obviously, there was a screw loose somewhere, since the math didn't quite work out right. But perhaps that was just some of the typical sly humor offered by Douglas Adams.

My own favorite was the bit about Vogon poetry being the 3rd worst in the universe, and how another contender's poetry was so bad that in a phenomenal show of nature's mercy, the judges who were listening to that poetry were saved by their entrails bursting out of their abdomens to strangle them before they would have to hear any more of it. Perhaps we could figure it out and play it over a loudspeaker in Moscow.
 

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