At any party of six, an unavoidable trio appears

Anecdota
At any party of six, an unavoidable trio appears
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🎲Math & logic

At any party of six, an unavoidable trio appears

Gather any six people. There will always be three who all know each other, or three complete strangers to one another. With five people, it isn't guaranteed. This result illustrates Ramsey theory, named after Britain's Frank Ramsey: in a large enough set, some order always emerges, even in the midst of chaos.

Wolfram MathWorld — Ramsey Number
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🎲Math & logic

Six Lego bricks can be combined in over 915 million ways

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.

Søren Eilers, University of Copenhagen (2005)
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🎲Math & logic

An A4 sheet cut in half keeps exactly the same shape

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.

ISO 216