It was during the first few weeks of my time at a new school. I'd transfered in the middle of spring, 7th grade. I was sitting in the back of math class not paying attention for some reason. Maybe Tom and I were stabbing each other with mechanical pencils to see who would make a noise first and get caught. Or maybe Joe was farting and blaming it on me, and I was busy giving him a "what the fuck is wrong with you" look. Doesn't really matter, point is there was that background dim of a 7th grade math teacher droning on about something or other. Its amazing how your name cuts through a room, slices your brain and pulls your attention out. Yes, the teacher had called on me. "Give me an example of a perfect number". She knew I hadn't been listening and she was about to make an example out of me. I immediately responded "Six." with a conviction that surprised even myself. I had no idea what constituted a perfect number, or even heard of the concept before, but I'd always liked six. So concise, so streamlined, so obviously perfect. She looked at me for a second and said "very good" and turned back to the board to continue with the lesson.
Well, hell, that was lucky. It peaked my interest enough to listen and try to figure out why my answer was right before going back to my fart denials, or whatever. But it wasn't really that easy to figure out cause she was on to the next topic and I could only glean so much before she erased the board to make more space. I surmised that a perfect number is an integer that is divisible by both even and odd numbers.
Wrong.
My Sister-in-law sent me this yesterday:
A perfect number is defined as an integer which is the sum of its proper positive divisors, that is, the sum of the positive divisors not including the number. Equivalently, a perfect number is a number that is half the sum of all of its positive divisors, or σ(n) = 2 n. The first perfect number is 6, because 1, 2 and 3 are its proper positive divisors and 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. The next perfect number is 28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14. The next perfect numbers are 496 and 8128.
Suck on that Ms. Weinberger. I didn't know then and I apparently still don't know what a perfect number is. And apparently I got much luckier than I thought, cause perfect numbers by my definition are way more common. There's no way I'd pull 496 or 8128 out of my ass.
1 comment:
See, you'd think that, but she didn't know I was full of it till someone else told her.
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