re: #922 Pietr

I made up a formula in Geometry that impressed the Teacher-and he’d co-written the textbook we were using. But I’m not an auto math type-I have to work at it, LOL. But it came in handy, when I became an electronic tech…..:>))

Ever hear of Solomon W. Golomb? By the time he was in college, he had memorized all the exponential expressions of the form X^Y up to 10¹⁰.

He was in his college biology class, where the teacher mentioned that human DNA has 24 chromosones (We now know it actually has 23, but it was believed to be 24 at the time). The teacher then mentioned that this meant there were 2²⁴ possibilities, and joked that “everybody knows how many that is.”

Young Mr. Golomb immediately shouted out, “Yep! It’s 16,777,216!” The teacher thought he was trying to be funny, and used a calculator to work out the problem. He was astounded that it actually was 16,777,216!

How did he know? As I mentioned, he had memorized all the exponential expressions of the form X^Y up to 10¹⁰. While he couldn’t do 2²⁴ in his head, he did realize that this was the same thing as 8⁸, which he did know!