Oh. Um, I just see a lot of numbers as their prime factorization so it was obvious something unusual was going on. Probably not helpful to you, there. But I guess it’s similar to what gjm said. Like how you’d notice if everything was divisible by 10 because everything ended in 0s, but not quite so clear.
Maybe it is. Feynman’s abacus story suggests that he (and colleagues) were familiar with lots of specific numbers and that it matters, somehow. Perhaps I should pick up the habit. Or perhaps that’s backwards, and there’s some particularly useful skill tree that, as a side effect, results in learning to recognize lots of numbers. Either way, just knowing that this is a common thing among the mathematically inclined is worth knowing.
Oh. Um, I just see a lot of numbers as their prime factorization so it was obvious something unusual was going on. Probably not helpful to you, there. But I guess it’s similar to what gjm said. Like how you’d notice if everything was divisible by 10 because everything ended in 0s, but not quite so clear.
Maybe it is. Feynman’s abacus story suggests that he (and colleagues) were familiar with lots of specific numbers and that it matters, somehow. Perhaps I should pick up the habit. Or perhaps that’s backwards, and there’s some particularly useful skill tree that, as a side effect, results in learning to recognize lots of numbers. Either way, just knowing that this is a common thing among the mathematically inclined is worth knowing.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that the largest contributor towards viewing numbers like that was probably my courses taught from https://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Combinatorial-Mathematics-Applied-Introduction/dp/0201199122/ in university.