"Mathematicians are machines that turn coffee into theorems." The phrase is from Alfred Renyi, one of the "Martians," as Enrico Fermi called them: Hungarian scientists who, with the advent of Nazism, fled to the United States before World War II.
So before you read this post, take a nice bottle of No. 124, drain every last drop. Then read and send us any other properties of No. 124 that we may have missed....
As everyone knows, Nº 124 "stole" the number from the artwork of Tom Tjaarda, who designed the 124 Spider for Pininfarina. Tjaarda, a Dutch-born U.S. designer, designed some 40 Italian cars, including the De Tomaso Pantera, the Lancia Thema and the FIAT Barchetta. And he was rightly called "the master of proportion."
Proportions lead back to mathematics. Pythagoras thought that proportions lay at the foundation of the universe. We now know that rational numbers, so dear to Pythagoras, are an infinitesimal of irrational ones-that is, given two lengths measured in the real world, it is impossible for the ratio between the two to be a rational number.
That is not to say that proportions, rational or otherwise, are not important. And proportions are ratios between numbers, and 124 is a number. What kind of number is it?
- Of course it is even. It also differs by a power of 2 to another power of two (missing 4 to get to 128)
- It is non-totient. That is, there is no number that has 124 numbers, smaller than the number itself, that are coprime (two numbers are coprime if they have no divisors in common except 1)
- It is the 17th non-totaling even number
- The sum of the digits is a prime number (7), which is also the power of 2 to which it approaches (128 = 2 to the 7)
- It is an untouchable number, that is, there is no number whose divisors (including 1), when added together, give 124.
- It is the sum of 8 consecutive prime numbers (5 + 7 + 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29)
- It goes without saying that because it is untouchable, it is not perfect: in fact, the sum of the divisors of perfect numbers gives the number itself (e.g. 28 = 1+2+4+7+14)
The number may be imperfect ... but the drink is (or at least we try to)!
