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Letters

January 2000

Curious about nines

I recently noticed a curious fact about the number nine and the result of multiplying it. Could you provide an explanation for this beyond "coincidence"? The curious fact is this:

If you multiply any number from 1 through 31 by nine the result is a number that when the digits are added either equals nine or results in two nines. For example, 9 x 2 = 18; and 9 x 31 = 279.

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Editorial

  • New Millennium, New Name and New Look
  • How to lie with statistics
  • World maths year 2000
  • Network capacity problem - issue 3 revisited
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A good BETT

January 2000

The British Educational Technology show, held annually at Olympia in London, was its usual busy success this year. The big players were all there - RM, IBM, Compaq, ICL/Fujitsu, Intel and last, but of course not least, Microsoft.

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Career interview: Sales forecasting

Helen Thompson works for Sainsbury's Supermarkets as a Sales Forecasting Manager. The Plus team paid her a visit at Drury House on the banks of the Thames in London.
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In space, do all roads lead to home?

Is the Universe finite, with an edge, or infinite, with no edges? Or is it even stranger: finite but with no edges? It sounds far-fetched but the mathematical theory of topology makes it possible, and nobody yet knows the truth. Janna Levin tells us more.
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Codes, computers and trees

Underlying our vast global telecommunications networks are codes: formal schemes for representing information in machine-readable and transmissible formats. Kona Macphee examines the prefix property, one of the important features of a good code.