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Is every integer the sum of four perfect cubes? Interestingly, no one knows. It’s conjectured that the answer is yes, but no one yet has been able to prove this.

“Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.” — Karl Popper “There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.” — Enrico Fermi “This particular thesis was addressed to me a quarter of a century ago by John Campbell, who …...

In 2020, three researchers from UT Austin and Lancaster University examined 40,000 fictional narratives and discovered a consistent linguistic pattern. Articles and prepositions such as a and the are common at the start of a story, where they set the stage by providing information about people, places, and things. As the plot progresses, auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and pronouns become more common — words that...

A tail behind, a trunk in front, Complete the usual elephant. The tail in front, the trunk behind, Is what you very seldom find; If you for specimens should hunt With trunks behind and tails in front, That hunt would occupy you long; The force of habit is so strong. — A.E. Housman

“One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money most, are the very ones that never have it.” — Finley Peter Dunne

By Wikimedia user Cmglee, a visual proof that 33 + 43 + 53 = 63: This value, 216, is sometimes called Plato’s number because it seems to correspond to this enigmatic passage in the Republic: Now for divine begettings there is a period comprehended by a perfect number, and for mortal by the first in which augmentations dominating and dominated when they have attained...

I don’t know anything about this; it just popped up on the subreddit r/funny: “Someone in the Netherlands has a sense of humor.”

In the December 2024 issue of Recreational Mathematics Magazine, Illinois State University mathematician Sunil Chebolu demonstrates that the digits of π can be generated using the positions of stars. The probability P(x, y) that two randomly chosen positive integers, x and y, are relatively prime is 6/π2. The stars in the night sky appear to be distributed randomly on the celestial sphere, and this...

postation n. the placing of one thing after another consectaneous adj. succeeding, following as by consequence resiliating adj. that resumes or causes to resume a former shape or position finifugal adj. shunning the end of something Jason Allemann built this infinite LEGO domino ring in 2023. Sixty-four dominoes fall in a continuous loop, with a robot circulating perpetually opposite the cascade to restore the...

In his 1957 book A Testament, Frank Lloyd Wright described a skyscraper a mile high that he hoped to build in Chicago. Atomic-powered elevators would serve a net rentable area of more than 13 million square feet, with covered parking for 15,000 cars and landing decks for 150 helicopters. Wright imaged it would be “more permanent than the pyramids,” but the plan was never...

In discussing the paintings, [Jackson Pollock] would ask, ‘Does it work?’ Or in looking at mine, he would comment, ‘It works’ or ‘It doesn’t work.’ He may have been the first artist to have used the word ‘work’ in that sense. — Lee Krasner, quoted in B.H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, 1972

In 1937 a Sabena Junkers Ju 52 crashed in Ostend — the plane struck a factory chimney while attempting to land in thick fog. Everyone aboard was killed, including Princess Cecilie, the older sister of Prince Philip, later Duke of Edinburgh. She had been eight months pregnant, and a newborn infant was discovered in the wreckage. It’s speculated that she had given birth during...

In his later years Joseph Conrad became obsessed with the opening scene of an unwritten novel that he planned to set in an Eastern European state. “So vividly used he to describe this scene to me,” wrote his friend Richard Curle, “that at last it was as though I had been a witness to it myself”: “In the courtyard of a royal palace, brilliantly...

C.W. Hooper of Keswick sent this creation to the Strand in August 1901: “It contains all the letters of the alphabet, twenty-six in all. They can be traced with patience. The letter N is the smallest (in the centre), and is the only indistinct one.”

This poem, by Lewis Carroll, can be read line by line in the conventional way, but the same text results when it’s scanned “downward” in columns, reading the first word of each of the six lines, then the second, and so on: I often wondered when I cursed Often feared where I would be -- Wondered where she'd yield her love, When I yield,...

Obscure words from the personal collection of Eric Albert, from a Word Ways article in November 1988: agroof: face downward amphoric: resembling the sound produced by blowing into a bottle benedict: an apparently confirmed bachelor who marries bort: the fragments removed from diamonds in cutting callipygian: having shapely buttocks charette: a period of intense group work to meet a deadline clishmaclaver: gossip crepitaculum: the...

In 1940, George Gamow published Mr Tompkins in Wonderland, in which a bank clerk attends a lecture on relativity and then finds that Einstein’s principles have become apparent in the ordinary street scenes before him: A single cyclist was coming slowly down the street and, as he approached, Mr Tompkins’s eyes opened wide with astonishment. For the bicycle and the young man on it...

“A Lowlands Holiday Ends in Enjoyable Inactivity,” a poem by Miles Kington: In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass? Inertia, hilarious, accrues, hélas! In certain British dialects, the two lines sound the same.

An invertible word made of impossible letters, by Basile Morin: An emphatic assertion by Douglas Hofstadter: In 1908, after observing that chump in cursive reads largely the same upside down, the Strand asked for similar specimens and received this:

Writing in the New Yorker in 1949, John Davenport documented a rising language he’d observed among his countrymen. He called it Slurvian. “When Slurvians travel abroad, they go to visit farn (or forn) countries to see what the farners do that’s different from the way we Murcans do things. While in farn countries, they refer to themselves as Murcan tersts, and usually say they...

Charles Craik of Weston-super-Mare received this enigmatic postcard from a friend in 1901 and sent it on to the Strand: I think it rather cleverly done, and it took me some time before I could understand its meaning. The principal message is on the big island in the centre of the map — an invitation to meet the sender at a café, with the...

But despite the gaiety of his song, Balso did not feel sure of himself. He thought of the Phoenix Excrementi, a race of men he had invented one Sunday afternoon while in bed, and trembled, thinking he might well meet one in this place. And he had good cause to tremble, for the Phoenix Excrementi eat themselves, digest themselves, and give birth to themselves...