I know, I know, the title is quite geeky, but hear me me out. I agree that numbers have potential to be quite boring, but they really don’t have to be. Statistics really can be cool, even beautiful, with the right care and presentation. I have always been impressed with people who know how to visualize data, and recently 37signals blog posted a “fireside” chat with three people who do a great job of this. Take Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns project. He took tons of flight data from the FAA, what must have been pages and pages of raw data, and turned it into a beautiful flow of information. Still confused? For example, the thumbnail at left is a color-coded map of flights on the west coast of the U.S. Yup, that’s San Francisco, Las Vegas & L.A. If you go to his website you can see more photos and even a few movies of this type of visualization. By far my favorite part of the movies is when it hits 7am in New York and the entire east coast lights up with new flights.

Numbers can be pretty sweet even if they aren’t artistically rendered. If you’ve been keeping track of my reading list might have seen a book named The Man Who Counted. Aside from being a fun read, it introduced me to 142,857. Looks like a pretty average number right? But check this out:

• 142,857 x 2 = 285,714

The product has the same numbers in it, but the 14 has just been moved to the right. Now, keep multiplying and…

• 142,857 x 3 = 428,571
• 142,857 x 4 = 571,428
• 142,857 x 5 = 714,285
• 142,857 x 6 = 857,142
• 142,857 x 7 = 999,999

Notice any pattern? The numbers are always in the same order! But just wait, there’s more.

• 142,857 x 8 = 1,142,856
• 142,857 x 9 = 1,285,713
• 142,857 x 10 = 1,428,570
• 142,857 x 11 = 1,571,427

It may seem like these cycles are “missing” a digit (e.g. the last 7 in the first example), but you can “find” that number by adding the first and last numbers (the one’s I’ve put in bold). As it turns out, 142,857 is what’s known as a cyclic number. Heck, this number even has it’s own page on Wikipedia, where they show off other “tricks” that it can perform (try dividing the number). Pretty cool hu? Know of any other cool numbers or visualizations? You should let me know!