I love multiplying to 24. I’ll get back to that.
One of the fun quirks of the calendar that folks like to glom onto are interesting patterns. The last day of the last year is an example: 12/31/23. An outsized number of couples reportedly got married, with no excuse for not remembering their anniversary.
Of course, that doesn’t quite work unless your calendar is MM/DD/YY. If you use DD/MM/YY, like most civilised places, then 31/12/23 isn’t all that. Pi day works as 03/14, but not so much as 14/03.
At the beginning of each century, we had fun repeating numbers: 01/01/01, 02/02/02, all the way to 12/12/12, and the order does not matter. This means, though, that I’ll have to wait until 1 January 2101 for the next one, when I’ll be 147.
Meanwhile, I’m noting all the wonderful dates that multiply to 24. Since multiplication is communicative – changing the order of the factor does not change the product – it doesn’t matter which way you do your calendar.
01/24 or 24/01 is January 24, and the product equals 24
02/12 or 12/02. Is that February 12 or December 2? It doesn’t matter; it multiplies to 24. 03/08 and 08/03 are March 8 and August 3, which multiplies to 24. 04/06 and 06/04 are April 6 and June 4; multiply them and get 24.
That’s seven combinations. Is there any other year that generates more combinations? Does another year generate even as many? The years ending in 12 and 48 have six such dates each.
And if you’re a YY/MM/DD person, which a librarian will tell you is quite logical in file naming, you can divide.
Unrelated, 24 is the uniform number of my favorite baseball player ever, Willie Mays.
Note perfect
I hear numbers. It’s not unlike hearing music. You have whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes. You can add a dot and extend the value by 50%.
This article from the American Mathematical Society quotes Pythagoras: “There is geometry in the humming of the strings; there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”
AMS notes – no pun intended: ” Counting, rhythm, scales, intervals, patterns, symbols, harmonies, time signatures, overtones, tone, pitch. The notations of composers and sounds made by musicians are connected to mathematics.”