Today is the 353th day of the year. Which means that it is a palindrome — writing the digits forward is the same as writing them backward.
It would probably be relatively easy to count up the number of days in the year that are palindromes. And a good computer programmer might be able to write a program to answer the question faster than most people could count it up manually. Consider these as exercises for the reader. 🙂
This leads to a more general question: For any given number (in this case 365), how many palindromes are there in the numbers counting up to that number?
And that leads to other questions. For example, how quickly do palindrome numbers increase? Is the palindrome number of 1000 ten times larger than the palindrome number of 100?
These may seem like crazy questions. But you never know with math. Every once in a while, asking seemingly crazy mathematical questions leads to the discovery of something surprising and wonderful about the nature of the Universe.