Monday, October 31, 2005


Oh Lewis I forgot
At some time you will have to get yourself to this location.
N51 46.430 W001 19.358
For what you're looking for is nicely sheltered.
Lets call its value LN
Not just yet though for there are some more numbers you need to think about first.
And by the way, you will not need one of these.

Brahma

Lewis
Frustrating isn't it?
Especially when you cannot keep your own forensic photographs secure.
Poor old Oughtred, lying there with his face in the paper.
But look harder, there are 3 prime numbers on that front page.
If you add them all up you will get another prime.
Lets call that value P

Brahma

4
= 2 x 2 A square.
1, 3, 4, 7, 11, 18, 29... A Lucas number.
A quartet, a foursome...
The word four has four letters. In the English language there is no other number whose number of letters is equal to its value.
The number four on a calculator is made up of four light bars.
Many things are arranged in fours. There are four suits in a deck of cards, four points of the compass, and four phases of the moon. There are four wings on a bee and four leaves on a clover, if you are lucky.
The four seasons are spring, summer, autumn and winter. This theme has provided inspiration for many artists, for the composer Vivaldi, and for countless take-away pizza establishments.
A tetrahedron is a kind of pyramid with four triangular faces. It also has four corners.
On maps adjacent countries are usually shown in different colours. What is the smallest number of colours needed? In 1852 Francis Guthrie guessed that the answer is four colours for any map, no matter what shape the countries take. No one has ever found a map that needs more than four colours. But it has been difficult to find a satisfactory proof that only four colours are needed. In 1976 Wolfgang Haken and Kenneth Appel claimed to have proved the four-colour conjecture, but their proof is so complicated, involving hundreds of hours of calculation by a computer, it has been very difficult for other mathematicians to check.
Tetra- means four. A tetradite is someone who attaches mystical properties to the number four. A tetragram is a word with four letters (like four itself).
Quad- also means four. A quadruped is a four-footed animal like an aardvark, or almost any animal for that matter.
Plus fours are loose baggy trousers which require an extra four inches of cloth in tailoring. This ridiculous male fashion was popular with golfers in the 1920s.
In a molecule of DNA, just four bases are used to make up the genetic code that determines the distinctive form of every plant and animal. The four bases are called thymine, adenosine, guanine and cytosine, or just T, A, G and C.
Four-dimensional means that something has an extra dimension as well as length, width and depth. For the scientist, this is usually the dimension of time, where space and time are thought of as part of the same continuum.
However, in mathematics, four-dimensional means an imaginary fourth dimension in space. With two dimensions you can draw a square and with three dimensions you can make a cube. But with four dimensions it is possible to represent something called a hypercube. Some mathematicians claim to be able to visualise four-dimensional space and can conjure up a clear picture in their heads of a hypercube, which they can rotate or cut in half.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Lewis
Rub her back!
She would eat you alive!
Did anybody ask her what sort of 'health farm'?

Brahma


3
3 is a prime number.
= 1 + 2 A triangular number.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13...A Fibonacci number.
1, 3, 4, 7, 11, 18, 29...A Lucas number.
A triad, triplet, trio, tern or hat-trick...
Tri- means three. So triangles have three sides, tripods have three legs and the dinosaur triceratops had three horns. The French flag is a tricolore because it has three colours. Trigonometry is a branch of mathematics based on measuring triangles.
Three-dimensional means that something has length, width and depth.
There are three school terms in a year.
Oaths are traditionally repeated three times.
The letters A F H K N Y Z are all made up of three lines.
There are three barleycorns in an inch, three feet in a yard, and three miles in a league. Barleycorns and leagues are some old imperial units of length which are no longer used today.
Once upon a time there were three little pigs ... three billy goats gruff ... Stories often begin this way and have a similar structure. Number one and number two are always similar so the listener is lulled into believing number three will be the same. But with number three there is a twist in the tale. In Greek mythology you will find Cerberus, a three-headed dog, and Scylla, a sea monster with six heads. It is curious that mythological heads are inclined to come in multiples of three.
If the number of petals on a flower is a multiple of three, it is probably from a group of plants called the monocotyledons which includes crocuses, daffodils, tulips, lilies and other plants grown from bulbs.
Most colours can be mixed from just three primary colours. But different primary colours are used for different purposes. For example, all the colours you see on a television screen are mixtures of red, green and blue light. With paint you can mix most colours from just red, yellow and blue pigments. The colours in books and magazines are usually printed from three coloured inks: cyan, magenta and yellow, although black ink is used as well.
We use three primary colours because of the way our eyes work. At the back of our eyes are cells called cones which are sensitive to coloured light. There are three different types of cone, each sensitive to different wavelengths of light. If our eyes were built differently and we had four types of cone cell, we would need to use four primary colours in printing, painting and television.

So your investigation gathers pace.
Now you know about Trig and Firkin and the Wytham Woods luv shack.
And you are seeing dear old Bogomolny, ask afters his wife's health.

Oh and if you are stuck on how Trig and Firkin works, I trust this little diagram helps.
This demonstrates Pure T&F, there are 'looser' versions of it.

Saturday, October 29, 2005


2
2 is a prime number and is the only even prime number.
= 1 x 2 Factorial 2 or 2!
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13... A Fibonacci number.
A deuce, a couple, a brace, a duo or a pair...
There are two blades on a pair of scissors and two sides to a piece of paper. People have two hands and so do some clocks. There are two sexes and two sides to an argument. Two-dimensional means that something has just length and width, but no depth.
Two’s company, three’s a crowd all depends on who you happen to be with.
Bi- means two. For example, a bicycle has two wheels and a bigamist has two husbands or two wives.
In binary code numbers are written to the base two. It uses just two symbols, 0 and 1. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6... become 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110...
The letters H, I and X all have two lines of symmetry.
Two has a very special property because2 + 2 = 4and also2 x 2 = 4.

So Lewis, you have found me so to speak.
About time for your first clue.
I have a number of display board magnetics that I took from Phillip's board in his room.
You will find this at N51 45.259 W001 15.199 outside the house of one of the greatest Savilian Professors. Not quite, as that is No7 so try No8.
It has a number on it, lets call its value H.

Friday, October 28, 2005


One, unit, unity, single, solo...
An ace is number one in playing cards. French playing cards are marked ‘1’ instead of ‘A’.
A cyclops is a creature with one eye and a dromedary is a camel with only one hump.
There is only one of lots of things. There is only one planet Earth, there is only one Atlantic Ocean and there is only one you. All of these are unique.
Words beginning with uni- often mean there is one of something. For example, unicycles have one wheel and unicorns have one horn. Unisex means the two sexes appearing as one because they are indistinguishable by hair or clothing.
The letters A, B, C, D, E, M, T, U, V, W and Y all have one line of symmetry.
A Möbius strip has one edge and one surface. It is easy to make by taking a long strip of paper, giving it one twist and joining together the ends. Ask one of your friends to colour one side of the strip red and the other side green. This turns out to be impossible because the strip has only one side.

Mono- can also mean that there is one of something. A monocle is an eyeglass with only one lens, and a monorail is a railway where the track consists of a single rail. Monochrome means using only one colour, like a black-and-white photograph. Chemical names often include mono-; for example carbon monoxide is a poisonous gas whose molecules have only one atom of oxygen.

Lewis
So you are interviewing Sylvia.
Ask her about their little love nest.

Brahma

Thursday, October 27, 2005


0
0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13......A Fibonacci number.
The introduction of zero into the decimal system in the 13th century was the most significant achievement in the development of a number system, in which calculation with large numbers became feasible. Without the notion of zero, the descriptive and prescriptive modeling processes in commerce, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and industry would have been unthinkable. The lack of such a symbol is one of the serious drawbacks in the Roman numeral system. In addition, the Roman numeral system is difficult to use in any arithmetic operations, such as multiplication.
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. We should appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by Greek antiquity.
What is certain is that by around 650AD the use of zero as a number came into Indian mathematics. The Indians also used a place-value system and zero was used to denote an empty place. In fact there is evidence of an empty place holder in positional numbers from as early as 200AD in India but some historians dismiss these as later forgeries.
In around 500AD Aryabhata devised a number system which has no zero yet was a positional system. He used the word “kha” for position and it would be used later as the name for zero. There is evidence that a dot had been used in earlier Indian manuscripts to denote an empty place in positional notation. It is interesting that the same documents sometimes also used a dot to denote an unknown where we might use x. Later Indian mathematicians had names for zero in positional numbers yet had no symbol for it. The first record of the Indian use of zero which is dated and agreed by all to be genuine was written in 876. A problem which arises when one tries to consider zero and negatives as numbers is how they interact in regard to the operations of arithmetic, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. In three important books the Indian mathematicians Brahmagupta, Mahavira and Bhaskara tried to answer these questions.
The brilliant work of the Indian mathematicians was transmitted to the Islamic and Arabic mathematicians further west. It came at an early stage for al-Khwarizmi wrote Al’Khwarizmi on the Hindu Art of Reckoning which describes the Indian place-value system of numerals based on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 0. This work was the first in what is now Iraq to use zero as a place holder in positional base notation. Ibn Ezra, in the 12th century, wrote three treatises on numbers which helped to bring the Indian symbols and ideas of decimal fractions to the attention of some of the learned people in Europe. The Book of the Number describes the decimal system for integers with place values from left to right. In this work ibn Ezra uses zero which he calls galgal (meaning wheel or circle).
The Indian ideas spread east to China as well as west to the Islamic countries. In 1247 the Chinese mathematician Ch’in Chiu-Shao wrote Mathematical treatise in nine sections which uses the symbol O for zero. A little later, in 1303, Zhu Shijie wrote Jade mirror of the four elements which again uses the symbol O for zero
Of course there are still signs of the problems caused by zero. Recently many people throughout the world celebrated the new millennium on 1 January 2000. Of course they celebrated the passing of only 1999 years since when the calendar was set up no year zero was specified. Although one might forgive the original error, it is a little surprising that most people seemed unable to understand why the third millennium and the 21st century began on 1 January 2001.
Zero is still causing problems!
Lewis
Want to know a few things about numbers do you?
Well this was something our dear departed friend was working on.

Brahma

Wednesday, October 26, 2005


Well well well!
D S Lewis, two can play at this game. I have been following your career since that serial killer.You got there in the end, such a surprise as well.
Now lets see if you have it in you to find this so called murder weapon.

Brahma