I recently proffered the first quiz from Mr. Heafford’s book.

As I suspected, it scared everyone away. Except for the mathematician that I know reads the blog. He offered up his answers. The 9 of the 20 he answered were all the same answers offered by the author.

Many of the numbers give more of a glimpse of how the world has changed in the last 50 years. Since calculators became widely used in the 60s and 70s, and then computers in the 80s, we rarely “handle” these numbers directly. Number of centimeters in an inch, sure, but the square root of 2? No.

Answers after the jump:

1. 1,760 – Yards in 1 mile.
2. 2,000 – Pounds in 1 ton.
3. 4,840 – Square yards in 1 acre.
4. 640 – Acres in 1 square mile.
5. 1.732 – The square root of 3.
6. 2.54 – Centimeters in an inch.
7. 3.1416 – pi – the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
8. 366 – Days in a leap year.
9. .3010 – The logarithm of 2 to the base 10.
10. 1492 – The year in which Christopher Columbus found land (in the Bahamas) by sailing west from Spain.
11. .4771 – The logarithm of 3 to the base 10.
12. .4971 – The logarithm of pi to the base 10.
13. 1.6 – 1.6 kilometer = 1 mile, and 0.6214 mile = 1 kilometer
14. 1.414 – The square root of 2.
15. 1,728 – Cubic inches in 1 cubic foot.
16. 3-4-5 – Ratio of the sides of a right-angled triangle.
17. 6,080 – Feet in a nautical mile.
18. 62½ – The weight of 1 cubic foot of water.
19. 90 – Degrees in 1 right angle.
20. 88 – 88 feet per second is the same as 60 miles per hour.