I am currently attending a conference that is housing everybody in a rather large hotel. When I checked in last night I was given room 3025.<\/p>\n
My first thought when I looked at the number was “Ah, this is a perfect square”. So as I carried my bags to the room, I mentally set about working out the square root of my room number.<\/p>\n
Being lazy, I did this the easiest way I could think of: I multiplied by four to find a number with zeros at the end. This gave me 12100. Which is clearly 121 × 100, or 112<\/sup> × 102<\/sup>, or 1102<\/sup>.<\/p>\n Having multiplied by four to get the square of 110, I now needed to divide 110 by two. So by the time I arrived at my room, I knew that the square root of 3025 is 55.<\/p>\n But how did I know, in that first moment at the registration desk, that 3025 is a perfect square?<\/p>\n I remember that I had immediately been struck by seeing “30” followed by “25”. This suggests that I may have subconsciously recognized the visual pattern 2500 + 500 + 25 as an instance of (a2<\/sup>)100 + (2a)10 + a2<\/sup>, or (10a + a)2<\/sup>.<\/p>\n If this is true, it would mean that my conscious and subconscious minds had gone in completely different directions. And it would also mean that my subconscious mind had been a whole lot quicker than my conscious mind.<\/p>\n Alas, if only my conscious mind could be as quick as my subconscious mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am currently attending a conference that is housing everybody in a rather large hotel. When I checked in last night I was given room 3025. My first thought when I looked at the number was “Ah, this is a perfect square”. So as I carried my bags to the room, I mentally set about … Continue reading “3025”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8913"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8913"}],"version-history":[{"count":79,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8992,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8913\/revisions\/8992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}