How many books claim the nautilus shell, or the Parthenon, follow the golden ratio? Measurements say no: the nautilus spiral is indeed regular, but it widens much more slowly than a golden spiral. As for the Parthenon, no document shows its architects aimed for that ratio. In 1992, mathematician George Markowsky catalogued these stubborn misconceptions.
How many different structures can you build with six classic 2-by-4 Lego bricks of the same colour? The company used to quote just over 102 million. In 2005, Danish mathematician Søren Eilers recounted everything by computer: 915,103,765 combinations. The official estimate had been too low by a factor of about nine.
Fold an A4 sheet in half and you get an A5 with the same proportions. That only works for one ratio between length and width: about 1.414, the square root of 2. The A0 format measures exactly one square metre, and A4 is a sixteenth of it. With standard 80-gram-per-square-metre paper, an A4 sheet therefore weighs exactly 5 grams.