Mathematicians are many things, and have many admirable qualities, but whimsy was never one I’d associated with them. Nevertheless, the other day I came across the concept of a “happy number”.
A happy number is one where if you perform a certain repeated mathematical action on it, you eventually end up with the number one. Let me explain. Take a number – any number. Now, square each of its digits, and add the results together. Repeat until you either end up in a repeating loop of results, or you get to one. If you get to one, your starting number is a happy one; if you end up in a repeating cycle, it’s unhappy.
For example, start with the number 28. Square each of its digits and add the results together. The square of two is four; the square of eight is 64. Add four and 64 together and you get 68. The square of six is 36; the square of eight is 64 – add 36 and 64 and you get 100. The square of one is one; the square of zero is zero; the square of zero is zero. One plus zero plus zero equals one – and therefore 28 is a happy number. Heaven knows what the point of happy numbers is, except to give geeks something to talk about when they’re bored with their PlayStations and Rubik’s Cubes and there’s no Star Trek or X-Files episodes running on Foxtel.
A number that seems to be cropping up quite a lot these days is 2012. That’s “twenty twelve”, as in the date. For many of us 2012 is far from a happy number, but I was keen to find out if I could formally attach the “unhappy” tag to it. So I started with 2012. Two squared plus zero squared plus one squared plus two squared is four plus zero plus one plus four, and that equals nine. Nine squared is 81; square them, add them … 65 … square them, add them … 61 … square, add ….37…square, add…58…89…145…42… 20…4…16…37–and we hit 37 earlier in this sequence, which puts us into a loop. So it’s official: 2012 is an unhappy number. Apparently, in the Mesoamerican long-count calendar (that is, the calendar used by the Mayans, as if you didn’t know) the world ends in 2012. Or something really bad happens in that year, anyway. Or it ends in the long-count calendar’s equivalent of 2012, which is expressed in base-20 counting, so 2012 comes out as 13.0.0.0.0.
And before the eagle-eyed among you jump on that as being an inaccurate tally, remember that the second digit from the right resets to zero after it reaches 18, not 20. Don’t ask me why. There seems to be the same spirited argument about this date among aficionados of the long- count calendar as there was when we celebrated the end of the last millennium/beginning of the current one. Most of us celebrated when the calendar ticked over from 1999 to 2000; a certain slightly self-satisfied subset preferred to party when the calendar ticked over from 2000 to 2001, on the basis that 2001 was, in fact, the first year of the new millennium.
Among long-count calendar watchers, there’s debate over whether we should be wary when the calendar ticks over from 12.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.0 or when it ticks over from 13.0.0.0.0 to 13.0.0.0.1. Those crazy guys! As we know – how could we not?! – 2012 is the year the FPA has proposed that product com- missions be phased out. That’s why it’s unhappy for so many financial planners I know. I note that it’s also the title of a new movie, with the tagline, “Who will be left behind?”. When I read that, I thought: “At last – someone has made a movie about financial planning!” I watched the trailer, but the sound wasn’t working on my PC. There were images of fireballs falling from the sky, car crashes, and some very large, solid-looking edifices that crumble into rubble, so it certainly looked like it could be about financial planning.
The movie 2012 comes out this month, and I’ll be there to see it. If it actually is about financial planning I want to find out if it’s true that the part of Jo-Anne Bloch is played by Nicole Kidman.
