The Saywot Blog

As I continue to record and store notes on grammar-related issues I will from time-to-time become distracted and there will appear a few words about something completely different.
This is one of those times.
I start with a question. What do the numbers 6 and 28 have in common ?
I suppose they have a lot of things in common, many of which I’m not going to know because I’m not an expert in those two particular abstract notions (because there is no such thing as a six or a twenty-eight is there ?) but consider this. They’re perfect – yep, they are perfect numbers !
Sadly the definition of ‘perfect’ isn’t the common definition of the term it’s what mathematicians call perfect. It means that they are positive integers equal to the sum of their proper divisors.
Even the term ‘proper’ isn’t used as one would normally apply it. We normal humans would use it to mean ‘real’, ‘genuine’ or ‘true’. We’d even stretch it to mean ‘right’, ‘correct’, ‘accepted’, ‘orthodox’ mathematicians mean that the divisor is a whole number – 1/4 or 1/10 as opposed to 1/2.25 (I may have wrongly assumed that you knew that the number below the line in a fraction is the divisor).
So here’s the thing, there are only 49 known perfect numbers and they’re all even – even using the big powerful computers we have around the place today the community of people who are interested in these matters haven’t found any new ones for quite some time. And for a large part of human history there were only a handful. Four of them date back to 400 BCE then a few more in the 17th Century.
They may be perfect they’re definitely rare.
And that’s the end of this digression however there may be more later on ‘Friendly Numbers” and “Sociable Numbers”