Elf, you remember posting earlier that your father mentioned that in his day, £1 = $5 approximately?My Dad's degree was primarily in mathematics, and when I was young he told me about some of the strange things — or moer accurately the counterintuitive things — that occurred in maths. "e" and pi are both indeterminates and "i" (the square root of -1) is an imaginary, but e to the power of i pi (e^ipi) is -1. (My ASCII and ANSI sets don't include the Greek letter pi). IIRC this arises from the maths expansions of some of the trigonometrical functions, but the next one he told me about is beyond my maths abilities. One of the questions in an exam was to show that i to the power i (i^i) pounds equalled dollars. Apparently i^i equals about 4.5 (again IIRC!) and in his day the pound sterling was worth about 4.5 dollars.
Other strange things also occur, like the fact that if there are 25 people (picked at random) in a room, the odds are almost exactly 50/50 that two of them will have the ame birthday. Totally counterintuitive!
