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:

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I obtained a book a few years back from Crazy Mike’s Crazy Emporium, that was once located at what is now Sig’s Lagoon.

This 1959 book was written by Philip Heafford, Department of Education, University of Oxford: The Math Entertainer. His goal, from his introduction seems extremely optimistic. To entertain enjoyers of mathematics, but also to interest those who think they don’t like math.

(As a side note, this book was a gift to someone from Aunt Thelma and Uncle Nolen in 1974.)

The book contains 50 quizzes. And here, throwing copyright to the wind (that discussion for another day – and if the author would like me to remove this post, he need only ask), is the first quiz.

How many can you get? (feel free to post a reply) I got maybe half of them, maybe less.

Quiz No. 1: Quickies

Do these numbers ring a bell? For instance, the number 365 would mean only one thing to me, and that is the number of days a year. Ask someone to test you with this quiz. Six seconds for each question. How many can you get right in the time limit of two minutes for all the questions?

1. 1,760
2. 2,000
3. 4,840
4. 640
5. 1.732
6. 2.54
7. 3.1416 . . .
8. 366
9. .3010
10. 1492
11. .4771
12. .4971
13. 1.6
14. 1.414
15. 1,728
16. 3-4-5
17. 6,080
18. 62½
19. 90
20. 88

The answers, who got them, and my thoughts will follow (at some point).