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Friday, August 19, 2005

Google: Fun with numbers

In today's Wall Street Journal (wsj.com; requires subscription) they show that Google likes math! Yes!

" Amid all the mystery, the tech company seemed to leave a clue that suggests the size of the offering wasn't arbitrary by stipulating that the number of shares Google plans to sell is 14,159,265. Those are the first eight digits that follow the decimal in the value of pi (which is 3.14159265), a number representing the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter."

And there's this:

"(The IPO also showed Google's inclination to have fun with figures. In an SEC filing the company said it sought to raise as much as $2,718,281,828. The number 2.718281828 is the constant e, which is related to natural logarithms and, like pi, a key concept in mathematics.)"

I think it's great that in the world of finance, inundated with numbers, Google has found a way, and does it, to introduce more advance ideas then just addition and subtraction.

Way to go, Google!!

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