If you were to play a word association game with a school-aged child, you’d be pretty unlikely to get a response of ‘cool’ when you asked them what word first came into their mind when you said ‘maths’. Despite what some people may tell you, maths is far from dull. On the contrary, there are plenty of fun and strange maths-related facts out there that will fascinate children of all ages. To prove this, we’ve compiled a list of 20 cool facts about maths which we encourage you to share with the children in your life.

• In a room of 23 people there’s a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday.
• If you write out pi to two decimal places, backwards it spells "pie".
• The word “hundred” comes from the old Norse term, “hundrath”, which actually means 120 and not 100.

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• 111,111,111*111,111,111=12345678987654321, which is a basic counting series, read from either end
• The only number that can never be represented by Roman numerals is ‘zero’.
• Most mathematical symbols weren’t invented until the 16th century. Before that, equations were written in words.
• “Forty” is the only number that is spelt with letters arranged in alphabetical order.
• Conversely, “one” is the only number that is spelt with letters arranged in descending order.
• From 0 to 1000, the only number that has the letter “a” in it is “one thousand”.
• ‘Four’ is the only number in the English language that is spelt with the same number of letters as the number itself.
• Every odd number has an “e” in it.
• The reason Americans call mathematics “math”, is because they argue that “mathematics” functions as a singular noun so ‘math’ should be singular too.
• The most popular favourite number of people is 7
• Did you ever notice you can express your laughter in numbers? No, but in Thailand the number ‘5’ is used for word ‘ha’ and a combination of 555 becomes ‘hahaha’.
• Eleven plus two” is an anagram of “twelve plus one” which is pretty fitting as the answer to both equations is 13.
• Also, there are 13 letters in both “eleven plus two” and “twelve plus one”.
• Zero is not represented in Roman numerals.
• The word “mathematics” only appears in one Shakespearean play, “The Taming of the Shrew”.

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