A chat with friends recently reminded me about pangrams, and what a cute little language curiosity they are. I also remembered that i never got a self-enumerating pangram generator to work. I should give that another try! I thought it would be fun play with ChatGPT and see if it could generate some good ones, expecting it to do quite well on this task. After all, LLMs should be excellent wordcels,…
Many moons ago, Vsauce tweeted : 1 = 1! 2 = 2! 145 = 1! + 4! + 5! 40,585 = 4! + 0! + 5! + 8! + 5! These are the only four numbers with this property. — Vsauce (@tweetsauce) February 18, 2018 Searching for these numbers on OEIS , we can find them on the sequence A014080 and learn that they are called factorions . Defined as numbers equal to the sum of the factorials of their digits, there are…
Recently i came across a puzzling property of numbers that got me to reflect on what “tickles” my mind as a programmer. And how programmers and mathematicians, even though they share much in common —a mix of playfulness and rigour, and a knack for logic problem-solving—, might be motivated by very different things. Of course, this is all painting with very broad strokes. Every person is different.
It’s always nice to learn a new trick that may ever so slightly improve the way we use our tools. Today i learned two such little tricks regarding the command-line.