Debunking a minor mathematical myth
While scrolling through r/all yesterday, I came upon this post from r/futurama. The linked album reveals the following 'hidden secret' from Season 9 Episode 9, 'Free Will Hunting', accompanied by this picture:
"10011101 = 157, the largest known number with a square that is an anagram to the square of the next integer (158)"
While the Futurama writers are known to be mathemtically inclined, this got my Spidey-senses tingling. I consulted the most reliable source at hand, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/157_(number\)), which reiterates:
"In base 10, 157^2 is 24649, and 158^2 is 24964, which uses the same digits. 157 is the largest known number with a square that relates in this way to the square of the next integer."
I was still skeptical, since this really doesn't seem like a very difficult property to satisfy. So I coded up a very quick Python script and set it up to run on my machine overnight:
import collections
curr = 0
while True:
if collections.Counter(str(curr**2)) == collections.Counter(str((curr+1)**2)):
print curr
curr+= 1
(collections.Counter objects are multisets)
To my surprise, the program started spouting off hits immediately:
13
157
913
4513
14647
...
It's no error. 913^2 = 833569 and 914^2 = 835396, which are anagrams. I thought maybe the fact was supposed to be that 157 is the largest known prime number with this property, but 4513 is prime too, and 4513^2 = 20367169 and 4514^2 = 20376196.
Going back to Wikipedia, this factoid (noun: an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print [1]) was actually the first substantive content added to the page for 157 way back in [November 2004](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=157_(number)&oldid=11515328) by one 'Anton Mravcek'. It now appears in Futurama-related contexts like this Buzzfeed list and IMDB trivia, but has also made its way into some unrelated pages like this list of 'What's Special About This Number?' and probably others with even more different wordings.
I'll edit the Wikipedia page later and remove this factoid, and try to contact the other websites about removing their incorrect statements. Since the same list of Futurama 'secrets' is undoubtedly going to continue to be shared, hopefully anyone skeptical enough to Google that secret will find this page disproving it.
TL;DR: OEIS A072841 does not end with the second entry.
Posted Aug 12, 2015, 4:57 PM UTC