Measure Britain's coastline with a 100 km ruler, then a 1 km one: the second result is far longer, because it follows every bay and rock. The shorter the ruler, the longer the coast, almost without limit. Lewis Fry Richardson noticed this when comparing borders; in 1967, Benoit Mandelbrot made it one of the starting points of fractal geometry.
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.