[HN Gopher] The fax numbers of the beast, and other mathematical...
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The fax numbers of the beast, and other mathematical sports
Author : marysminefnuf
Score : 25 points
Date : 2026-02-03 07:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cabinetmagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cabinetmagazine.org)
| fix4fun wrote:
| 667 - "fax number of the beast" - that was funny ;) The thing
| about mathematics is that it can tickle your brain - in a
| creative way.
|
| It's becoming increasingly difficult these days, with so many
| things competing for your attention and "brain-deadening" you. It
| was a wonderful thing to be bored and play around with math. My
| favorite moments were the epiphany - that there is some hidden
| connection between math areas or something got new meaning.
| NoSalt wrote:
| I had a similar epiphany in college, somewhere amongst Calc I,
| II, III, DiffEq, physics, and engineering. I kept meaning to
| pursue it, but life got in the way and I never did.
| Unfortunately, I can no longer remember what that epiphany was,
| and I am sad.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I don't know anybody who would both appreciate the fax number of
| the beast joke and not turn it into a conversation about 617
| being the real fax number of the beast according to most
| manuscripts.
| toast0 wrote:
| Yeah, but using 616 is problematic because it ruins the Barney
| is the antichrist bit [1], and we wouldn't want to associate
| NANPA area code 616 with both the beast and Grand Rapids, MI
| (historically, 616 covered more of western MI)
|
| [1]
| https://www.christadelphianbooks.org/agora/bible_books/jff01...
| crtasm wrote:
| As it doesn't seem to be linked, here is Hofstadter Q-sequence
| https://oeis.org/A005185
|
| I can't tell which of Chai Wah Wu's submissions the interviewer
| was referring to.
| https://oeis.org/search?q=Chai%20Wah%20Wu&fmt=short&sort=cre...
| bazzargh wrote:
| I think maybe https://oeis.org/A263499
|
| You can shorten the candidates list quite a bit:
| https://oeis.org/search?q=author%3A%22Chai+Wah+Wu%22+2015+Pr...
|
| The article says "Spring 2015" but in fact the magazine was
| published December 29, 2015. In the text it mentions
| https://oeis.org/history?seq=A250001 so the interview could not
| have been earlier than October 2015; Wu's sequence is "recent".
|
| There's a few sequences that jump out, this one, and the prime
| palindromes of 0's and 1s whose squares are palindromes; but
| that was August and seems too early.
| hwd wrote:
| Strange. In the article A138563 is described as a sequence of
| prime numbers that contain the substring 667. But these are
| obviously not prime numbers. Having a look at
| https://oeis.org/A138563 reveals that these are simply any
| numbers containing the substring.
| tomtomtom777 wrote:
| Well, they do mention they are looking up whether it exists
| during the interview, so it's a forgivable mistake.
| bombcar wrote:
| https://oeis.org/A321001 is what they wanted, obviously easy to
| get them confused.
| bombcar wrote:
| https://oeis.org/ is the page, interestingly enough
| https://oeis.org/A000001 is _not_ the "positive integers" -
| that's https://oeis.org/A000027
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(page generated 2026-02-04 23:01 UTC)