How to Amaze Your Friends with Number Tricks

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies.

There are tons of practical, real-world applications of math—building skyscrapers, launching satellites, programming video games and movie special effects, and running banks and stock markets. There are also tons of applications of math that aren't necessarily as practical, but are just as much—if not even more—fun. So today we're going to focus on this purely fun side of math and talk about a few number tricks that you can use to amaze your friends.

How to Perform a Number Trick With Years

Start by taking the last two digits from the year in which you were born and then add it to the age you're going to be at the end of this year. Go ahead and figure out what that number is for you. Again, it's the last two digits of the year in which you were born plus the age you'll be at the end of this year. I'm willing to bet that you got an answer of 111, right? How did I know that? Magic? Well, no...it's not magic. It's math.

This trick does seem pretty impressive, right? Since I have no idea what year you were born, it means this trick must work for everybody on Earth! Well, actually, it works for everybody who was born in the 20th century. If you were born after the turn of the new millennium and you do this trick, you'll always get the answer 11 instead of 111. But why?

How the Trick With Years Works

Here's how it works: Let's assume you were born in the 1900s. Then you can think of the last two digits of the year in which you were born as the answer to the problem 19xx – 1900 (where 19xx is your birth year). And you can think of the age you're going to be at the end of this year (which is 2011) as the answer to the problem 2011 – 19xx. Now, you'll recall that the instructions were to add the last two digits of your birth year, which we've seen can be written 19xx – 1900, to the age you'll be at the end of this year, 2011 – 19xx.

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