What’s your favourite number, and why?
… 17 is famous in mathematics for Carl Friedrich Gauss’s famous straightedge-and-compass construction of a regular 17-gon, for the 17 “wallpaper” symmetries of the plane, and for the fact that if you connect 17 suitably spaced dots with a segment of red, blue, or green, you will automatically create a “monochromatic” triangle whose three vertices are among the original 17 dots. And nobody has yet created a solvable Sudoku puzzle with fewer than 17 original entries. How about that? …
The answer is taken from an interview with Derrick Niederman, author of ‘Number Freak: From 1 to 200, The Hidden Language of Numbers Revealed.’
What is your answer?