Why is 21 the best number

If you pi to the first two decimal places of 3. Have a look here. Whether you love cats or hate them, you have most definitely have heard of that myth that these felines have nine lives. But have you ever wondered where this idea came from? It stems from their ability to jump and land without getting hurt!

It turns out there are a few theories for the number nine, though, one being that 9, again, is a magical number and was worshipped as such throughout the ages. Often, the number 1 is confused as a prime number. But that's not the case—one does not fulfill the requirements to be prime being divisible by both 1 and itself. Divide 1 by 1 and you get…1. Nothing has been divided. Anyone who's played blackjack knows that the goal is to get to 21, or as close to it without going over.

But the game is believed to have originated in Italy as the game Thirty One , which dates back to the 15th century. The goal is similar to get as close as possible to 31 but with some slight differences: all cards between 8 and 10 are removed from the deck and face cards are worth one-half their face value.

If you walked up to someone on the street and asked them what their favorite number is—of all the whole numbers between 1 and —there's almost a 10 percent chance they will say "7.

It was selected 9. You'd think unlucky number 13 would be one that most people want to stay away from. But in Alex Bellos' research, it turned out to be the most popular two-digit number selected by 5 percent of all respondents , and sixth-most popular number overall following 7, 3, 8, 4, and 5 in the top five spots—that's right, the number five is also the fifth most popular numbers.

You heard one is the loneliest number, but did you know numbers can be happy , too? To test if a number is "happy," replace it with the sum of squares in its digits, and continue the process until the number equals 1, or loops into a cycle that does not include 1.

If the process ends with 1, the number is happy. For example, take The number 7 may be so popular because it is arithmetically unique. Alex Bellos, again, explains : "Of the first 10 numbers, seven is the most prime.

You cannot multiply or divide it within the group. It feels unique. The cross-and-circle board game of Pachisi is a hugely popular game in India dating back centuries, played on a board in which a player throws several cowry shells.

Its name translates in Hindi to "Twenty-Five," which refers to the largest score that can be earned through the toss of the shells there's also a version where the score can reach A googol means 1 followed by zeroes.

A googolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeroes. If it's hard to imagine how long that number would look, there's good reason for that: to write it out would create a number that's so huge, if you wrote it out and printed it in a volumed series of books, it would weigh more than the entire planet. The city of Denver, Colorado, has an elevation of precisely 5, feet—that's the length of a mile—which is why Denver is called the "mile high" city.

Also known as "tetraphobia" the number 4 is viewed with superstition and distrust in much of East Asia. The reason for this may be due to the fact that the word for "four" sounds similar to "death" in a number of Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Teenagers texting in Thailand say that three times fast will send the digits "" to indicate that something is funny.

The reason? Out of the twelve months that make up a calendar year, the majority of these have 31 days: January, March, May, July, August, October, and December. Only four months—April, June, September, and November—have 30 days.

And, of course, February typically only has 28 days, with the exception of leap years, when the month jumps up to 29 days—which happen every four years. The next leap year will be in You will know if a year is a leap year when the year's number is evenly divisible by four. In a sample of 23 people, there is a 50 percent chance that two will share the same birthday.

This phenomenon is fittingly called the birthday problem. There is a whole calculation for why this is a thing, too. It all has to do with probability. For how, exactly, it works, direct yourself to this explainer , by mathematician Brett Berry, as she can do a far better job at explaining it than we ever could. You wouldn't think numbers could have genders, but in our weird brains they do, apparently.

Research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that when an odd number was paired with a baby, subjects were much more likely to believe the baby was male, while they would assume the baby was female when paired with an even number. It's an assumption with a long history, according to Live Science : "Our tendency to assign gender to numbers has a long history.

Discovered in , it is classified as a rare-earth element. These demands were related to the control of the region of Manchuria, and were opposed by the UK and the US. There were 21 shillings in a guinea, a form of currency used by Great Britain from all the way until , when they were replaced by the pound.

In Tarot, the number 21 is related to the card The World. One of the many meanings of this card is to have the world at your feet! According to the Bible there were 21 acts of rebellion committed by the Israelites to break free from Egyptian control. This more commonly known version is the American game Blackjack.

Known as the 21 gun salute, this tradition goes all the way back to the times when the navies of the world still shot cannonballs. From nature to governmental legislation to matters of metaphysics, the number 21 can be found in all aspects of our lives. But also it felt like the right time to survey the television landscape because arguably it has been the defining art form of the past 21 years: where once, rightly or wrongly, it was largely patronised as cinema's younger, more rough-and-ready sibling, today its artistic credibility is unassailable, while the advent of streaming platforms has also given shows the ability to reach unprecedented global audiences all at once.

And so, in order to mark TV's ascendancy, we have decided to ask the question: what are the greatest TV series of the 21st Century? While in no way definitive, the answers we have collated are fascinating — and, we hope, will inspire TV lovers everywhere to both seek out titles they haven't seen before, and further reflect on and discuss ones they have.

In total, different series were voted for by TV experts — critics, journalists, academics and industry figures — who came from 43 countries, from Albania to Uruguay. Of these voters, were women, were men, and two were non-binary. Each voter listed their 10 favourite TV series of the 21st Century, which we scored and ranked to produce the top listed below.

The result is a list that stands as a true testament to the power, versatility and innovation of the medium over the last two decades, from smalltown saga Gilmore Girls and caustic meta-comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm, which both kicked off in the immediate shadow of the new millennium in October , to the most recent entry, Barry Jenkins' transcendent adaptation of alt-history epic The Underground Railroad, which premiered in May At the same time, while the list is wide-ranging by some metrics, there are also ways in which it reflects significant biases.