{"id":161,"date":"2007-05-19T20:34:28","date_gmt":"2007-05-19T20:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/?p=161"},"modified":"2020-03-14T19:29:30","modified_gmt":"2020-03-14T19:29:30","slug":"dr-whos-happy-primes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/?p=161","title":{"rendered":"Dr Who&#8217;s Happy Primes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s so nice to see mathematics playing an important part in popular television. In <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/42_%28Doctor_Who%29\" title=\"Tonight's Dr Who\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">tonight&#8217;s Dr Who<\/a> the spaceship crew had to find the next number in the sequence 313, 331, 367, &#8230;. Dr Who recognises this as a sequence of <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Happy_number\" title=\"Happy numbers\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">happy primes<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0with the next one being 379. It&#8217;s all explained at that <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Happy_number\" title=\"Wkipedia article on hapy numbers\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Wikipedia article<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0and a longer version of the sequence can be found at the wonderful <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.research.att.com\/~njas\/sequences\/A035497\" title=\"The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s interesting that the <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Happy_number#Media_references\" title=\"Dr Who reference\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dr Who reference<\/a> was put in the Wikipedia article half-an-hour before the programme was aired so probably an inside job. I was delighted that\u00c2\u00a0in the programme Dr Who\u00c2\u00a0asked if mathematics was so dumbed down that recreational maths wasn&#8217;t studied any more. As <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Russell_T._Davies\" title=\"Russell T Davies\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Russell T.\u00c2\u00a0Davies<\/a>, the head writer,\u00c2\u00a0said in tonight&#8217;s\u00c2\u00a0<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/doctorwho\/confidential\/\" title=\"Dr Who Confidential\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dr Who Confidential<\/a>, the programme reflects current concerns, so this problem has clearly reached a wider audience than I imagined was the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s so nice to see mathematics playing an important part in popular television. In tonight&#8217;s Dr Who the spaceship crew had to find the next number in the sequence 313, 331, 367, &#8230;. Dr Who recognises this as a sequence of happy primes\u00c2\u00a0with the next one being 379. It&#8217;s all explained at that Wikipedia article\u00c2\u00a0and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}