To celebrate the retirement of our much beloved Head of Maths, Mr Hogg, we dedicate this week’s ‘Did You Know?’ to his favourite animal, the rhinoceros!
- A biotech group have made a 3-D print of a rhino’s horn that is so similar to the real thing that they are going to target Chinese and Vietnamese markets to reduce demand.
- In ancient times, rhino horns were thought to have magical properties like detecting poison which they are actually able to do.
- White rhinos are thought to be named due to their mouths as in Afrikaans; “wyd” translates to “wide” and has slowly morphed into the English calling them white rhinos. The black rhinos are named to distinguish between them.
- There used to be woolly rhinos with fossils dating 3.6 million years ago, who were mostly affected by climate change and hunting from humans causing them to go extinct.
- The Indian rhino has a horn that can range from 8 inches to 3 feet long and the males can weigh as much as 3.5 tons and reach over 6 feet tall.
- Rhinos can sleep both standing and lying down.
- Conservations in South Africa are using a red dye to inject into the rhino’s horn to make it useless to poachers and also toxic for human consumption. #SaveTheRhinos
- The French word for pie chart is “camembert” because cheese…
- 111,111,111×111,111,111=12345678987654321
- 10! Seconds= 6 weeks
- More than 2,000 years ago, a man named Eratosthenes approximated the circumference of the earth with a sundial and was accurate to within 2%.
- Think of a number and double it, then add 6 and halve it, now subtract it by the number you started with and you should get 3.
- The equal sign was created in 1557 when Robert Recorde, a welsh mathematician, decided he was fed up of always having to write “is equal to”.
- 2,520 is the smallest number that can be divided to give an integer by all numbers from 1 to 1
We all love rhinos and maths (maybe), which is why we are definitely going to miss Mr Hogg! We wish him the best of luck for the future and a lovely summer holiday!
Rumbidzai Nyamukapa, Lower Sixth
