Math Facts

A mathematical thought experiment once claimed that if China's population walked past you in single file, the line would never end due to reproduction rates—but China's population is now declining for the first time since 1961.

The opposite sides of a dice cube always add up to seven.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day.

There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.

If you had 10 billion $1 notes and spent one every second of every day, it would require 317 years for you to go broke.

In the cartoon "The Jetsons", Jane Jetson is 33 years old and her daughter Judy is 15, meaning Jane became a mother at just 18 years old.

Ancient India developed the decimal place-value number system around 500 CE, and mathematician Brahmagupta formally defined zero as a number in 628 CE.

If you flip a coin ten times, the odds against its coming up with the same side showing each time are 1,023 to 1.

The mathematical proof that 1+1=2 takes over 360 pages of groundwork in Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's three-volume work "Principia Mathematica," with the actual theorem finally proven on page 379 of the first volume.

If you're one in a million, there are about 8,100 people just like you.

In international education rankings, American students consistently score in the middle of the pack among developed nations in math and science, yet American students report among the highest levels of confidence in their own abilities—a phenomenon researchers call the 'confidence gap.'

Joan Ginther won the Texas lottery four times between 1993 and 2010, collecting $20.4 million. The odds of one person doing that by chance - roughly 1 in 18 septillion. Investigators later discovered she had a PhD in statistics from Stanford and had been studying scratch-off distribution patterns.