I was amazed to see this
tweet from our friends at the
Museum of Mathematics:
10*9*8+7+6-5+4*321Happy New Year!
— Museum of Math (@MoMath1)
January 3, 2012
A quick check with
Mathematica verified that, yes indeed, 10*9*8+7+6-5+4*321 = 2012. Wow! How in the world did anyone discover that rare factoid? And how long will it be until another year arrives that can be similarly expressed?
That's the sort of question that's so easy to answer with Mathematica that I couldn't not have a look. It turns out that what seemed to me like a rare jewel is as common as dirt. In fact, there is only one year in the next 100 that can't be expressed by interspersing +, -, *, /, or nothing between the numbers in order from 10 to 1! In subsequent correspondence with George Hart, the museum's Chief of Content, he told me that he learned the idea from Hans Havermann, who wrote about it in a
blog post last year. I've discovered what he had up his sleeve: abundant computing.