
Weird Number - benbreen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_number
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HocusLocus
I do believe mathematicians have co-opted a great many dictionary words to
describe obscure and unique properties of numbers, so they may converse at
parties and from a distance it sounds like a normal conversation.

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JMTQp8lwXL
The anthropomorphization of numbers is strange. It seems awfully subjective to
describe numbers meeting certain qualities as "weird".

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ncmncm
Wait until you find out what "awfully", "subjective", "certain", and
"qualities" mean to mathematicians.

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core-questions
Was introduced to this idea a while ago by the venerable Boards of Canada:
[https://bocpages.org/wiki/The_Smallest_Weird_Number](https://bocpages.org/wiki/The_Smallest_Weird_Number)

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teh_klev
Thanks for this! I've been a BoC fan since 2000 after discovering "Music Has
The Right To Children", I think in part due to John Peel. Amazingly this site
has slipped under my radar. Hard to believe it's 20+ years since that album
was released.

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core-questions
Right on. Yeah, I got into them in the 90s thanks to the odd way in which
Napster introduced me to new music. Typically I'd find an electronic artist,
search for them, and find songs by them on compilation albums or on mixtapes
that people had painstakingly separated into tracks with good ID3s. Download
those whole albums, listen, and then whatever was good from them, I'd put back
into the system. It was sort of like manually crawling through a curated
recommendations graph.

Ironically, it made me buy a ton of CDs, so the industry probably made more
off me than if I'd had no access to this sort of thing. $50 import British
double-CDs off Warp Records et al? You know I was shelling out for it.
Beautiful Warp20 collection with an unheard, virgin-vinyl cut from Boards of
Canada? How could I not, back when I was younger and had disposable income?

The cult aspect of BoC is what turned me into a follower, because there's all
these insane references that add a ton of depth to the music that still isn't
really there with most of the artists that have filled the space they carved
out.

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logfromblammo
It seems like the observation that all known weird numbers are even is almost
built-in to the definition of weirdness.

Having two as a prime factor is the single most effective way to increase the
number of integer divisors, as it is the smallest integer that you can
multiply by a larger prime to get a product different from both operands. If
there is an odd weird number larger than 10^21, the first one found would
probably be divisible by 3.

Finding the first primitive odd weird number seems like something you could
put on a CV.

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baulpunyan
Clifford Pickover has some really interesting books about numbers, including
The Wonders of Numbers or the Loom of God:
[http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/noodlead.html](http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/noodlead.html)

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iron0013
I hate to call a single Wikipedia user out, but every time I see a diagram on
a math or science related wiki page that does absolutely nothing to contribute
to an understanding of the topic and in fact only serves to confuse the
viewer, it always ends up having been made by
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee)

A lot of the time, I think it's better to simply not have any visual on a wiki
page than to have an utterly unhelpful visual.

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gorgoiler
Here’s the _Weird number_ Wikipedia entry with the diagram, as it seems to
have been edited out very recently by an anonymous editor:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weird_number&di...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weird_number&direction=prev&oldid=925992441)

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klyrs
What anon taketh away, anon giveth back. Long live Wikipedia

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jobigoud
> Examples

> The smallest weird number is 70. Its proper divisors are 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14,
> and 35; these sum to 74, but no subset of these sums to 70. The number 12,
> for example, is abundant but not weird, because the proper divisors of 12
> are 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6, which sum to 16; but 2 + 4 + 6 = 12.

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Scarblac
Why are they called weird?

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mosseater
Because most numbers that are abundant are semi perfect. Weird numbers are
abundant but -not- semi perfect.

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pterois
example 312-202-9901

home recording????

