Dear Readers,
Many years ago, during a show within the theatre of my previous school, the delightful song ‘Three is a Magic Number’ started playing, and suddenly hundreds of smiling people looked directly at me because practically everyone there knew that 3 is my absolute favourite number! (A new version of the song plays near the end of ‘Spiderman: No Way Home’.)
I might have been thinking about it less often when I was a child…
…but now there are honestly lots of reasons for my love of three, and the following lovely pictures do show some of them:-
SUCH TIME ON EARTH IS LIKE A MOMENT OUT OF JOYFUL ETERNITY SURE TO COME ♥♥♥
(& it’s a reassuring reminder here in Blog Post #121),
SO WE CAN LIVE WITH FULLY JUSTIFIED HOPE, JOY & PEACE THROUGHOUT OUR LIVES
Another favourite photo is the following stunning view of the French Alps that people shared via Facebook recently.
Personally, I think of our journey on Earth leading to Heaven.
It need not be feared. With trust in God, every step can be enjoyed gratefully.
That’s the sure way home.
My current house number is 11. Three fun facts involving it are:-
11 squared = 121, the palindromic number of this particular blog post
121 is the smallest 3-digit number which has exactly three factors: 1, 11 and 121; that happens because it’s the square of a prime number
11 cubed (or 11 raised to the power of 3) equals 1331,
another pretty palindrome 😊😊😊
It’s time for a quick, wee word puzzle… Rearrange the letters of TURN THE KEY to make THEN + the six-letter name of a beautiful country.
The beautiful Musica Mundi School (where I work as the Mathematics Teacher) is currently blessed with 7 lovely Turkish students. One of them is Cansu, who easily solved a little Christmas puzzle that kind friends first shared with me before I shared it with others, too.
I am going to move just one single number from one tree to another tree.
Can you read my mind and tell me which number I’ll move to which tree, and why?
My youngest, 15-year-old niece (in England) and my cousin Anne (in Scotland) both thought of moving number 9 to the first tree, after which the sum of the numbers on each tree will be exactly 15.
Cansu no less creatively thought of just moving 8 to the first tree, after which the individual tree sums would come to 14, 15 and 16, forming a nice sequence of consecutive numbers.
Now imagine that we wanted to have more than three trees. We’ll still be using the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 just once each.
How can the numbers be distributed such that the total on each tree is equal, using as many trees as possible?
Still thinking about my colleagues and my students, I would like to wish very bright ☼ happy birthdays to Norea (for this past Thursday), Mila (yesterday), Andrea (today) and Headmaster Herman for tomorrow ♥.
I know lots of people who love a good chess puzzle, and so let’s enjoy the following…
Where exactly should it be placed so that it will then be
Black to move and force checkmate in just 3 moves?
I would like to conclude now by wishing everyone a very blessed, joyful Christmas and a happy new year coming soon, too.
With kindest wishes as always,
Paul M😊twani xxx
P.S. In the chess puzzle, White’s invisible pawn is on f3, and Black forces checkmate with 1…Rf4+! 2 gxf4 Qh4+ 3 Kf5 Qxf4#, a beautiful finish!
In the ‘maximum number of trees’ puzzle, the answer is to have five trees with these numbers on them: 1 & 8; 2 & 7; 3 & 6; 4 & 5; 9. In that way, the total sum on each tree equals nine.
Paul Motwani 