On 24 May 2000, in Paris, the Clay Institute announced seven “Millennium Problems”, each carrying a million-dollar prize. Among them: the Riemann hypothesis on how prime numbers are distributed, and “P versus NP”, which asks whether every problem that's easy to check is also easy to solve. More than twenty-five years on, only one has been solved: the Poincaré conjecture.
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.