Perfect age

Posted on January 10, 2010 by Brent

Today is my birthday! This is the second and (barring any miraculous advances in medical science) final time that my age will be a perfect number. Unfortunately, the first time my age was a perfect number, I didn’t know what a perfect number was.

About Brent

Associate Professor of Computer Science at Hendrix College. Functional programmer, mathematician, teacher, pianist, follower of Jesus.
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15 Responses to Perfect age

  1. Jenni says:
    January 10, 2010 at 12:27 pm

    Happy Birthday!

  2. Sue VanHattum says:
    January 10, 2010 at 12:40 pm

    Happy birthday! (Dang, you’re young!)

  3. Mike says:
    January 10, 2010 at 1:12 pm

    Happy perfect bday! I just realized that I’m the same age… guess that makes us both perfect 😀

  4. MathPhan says:
    January 10, 2010 at 3:16 pm

    Another cool thing about your 28th birthday is that the day of the week is also the same as your original birthday. The day of your birthday changes by 1 each year, or by 2 in leap years. With 28 years and 7 leap years, that results in a change (mod 7) of 0, or the same day.

    Unlike a perfect number, you do have a chance of reaching your 56th and 84th birthdays to have this happen again…

    Happy birthday!

  5. Rick Regan says:
    January 10, 2010 at 5:25 pm

    And in its form 1/10/10, today’s date is a binary number — in a sense (http://www.exploringbinary.com/binary-dates-in-2010-and-2011/ ).

  6. Dave says:
    January 10, 2010 at 6:18 pm

    Happy 28th!

  8. Robert says:
    January 11, 2010 at 11:16 am

    Nice being perfect, but alas, you will never (also barring medical miracles) be a double-exponent age again (3^3).

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  10. Nick says:
    January 15, 2010 at 6:42 am

    Happy birthday Brent!

    I was excited at my last birthday because my age is now a perfect square. My next birthday, alas, won’t be all that interesting.

    • Brent says:
      January 15, 2010 at 5:30 pm

      Nick: Your claim is provably false: there are no uninteresting ages! Proof: if there were, there would be a smallest uninteresting age. Which would be rather interesting. 😉

  11. Nick says:
    January 15, 2010 at 8:38 pm

    I don’t know, … 1729 seems like it would be a most uninteresting age, if I were to live that long!

  12. Doug Jenkins says:
    January 15, 2010 at 9:46 pm

    Well 1729 was 281 years ago, and 281 (according to Wikipedia) is “prime, twin prime with 283, Sophie Germain prime, sum of the first fourteen primes, sum of seven consecutive primes (29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53), Chen prime, Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part, centered decagonal number”

    So that’s pretty interesting, isn’t it?

    Wikipedia also had some story about a guy in hospital being visited in their article about 1729, but it didn’t look very interesting, so I didn’t read it 😉

  13. Brent says:
    January 16, 2010 at 11:35 am

    Hehe. =)

  14. Tay says:
    January 28, 2010 at 11:05 am

    God, and I thought I talked about numbers a lot. You all just drew circles around me.

    Enjoy your “perfect number” year.

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