The BBC website, to commemorate the death of Jerry Nelson, the puppeteer behind Sesame Street’s Count von Count, posted a piece giving ten readers’ favourite numbers, and ten speculations as to why the Count’s favourite number was 34969.
I don’t think I have a favourite number; all numbers are special. But the number 100 played a big part in my DPhil thesis, and the number 276 helped me to get a research fellowship. (These two numbers are associated with two sporadic simple groups, the Higman–Sims group and Conway’s third group.)
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