This week I stood in one of the vaccination lines against covid. I will tell you now – in the sense of telling, narrating – about a case that happened to me. is greater than 0.25, the fourth part of that whole, what can we say? What kind of world are we in? Worse yet, which already enters the realm of the terribly comical, if people don’t know that the number 64 is smaller than the number 80, what can we say?īut this reality is very close to us, today, all over Brazil.

Now, if in elementary questions of mathematics, the general public does not know that 1/3 is greater than ¼, or that the third part of a whole, 0.333…. This article gave me one of the explanations, or perhaps the explanation, of why the round Earth became flat.

‘We proved it, 64 is less than 80!’, the commercial concluded enthusiastically. And I guarantee that 64 is less than 80.’ ‘I work in number theory, I specialize in partition congruences, modular forms, and the Riemann Hypothesis. Miller’s solution was original and clever: they hired mathematician Ken Ono from the University of Virginia to clarify the issue. The Miller company launched Miller64 beer, which has only 64 calories, to compete with the leader in the super light beer segment, Bud Light Next 80, which has 80 calories.īut market research showed that a good number of potential customers thought that 64 is more than 80, so the new beer would actually be heavier than the other one! We know that 3/9 is the same as 1/3, of course, but to many buyers it seemed much more, since 3 and 9 are larger numbers…. Why pay the same for less meat?Ī&W and their publicists thought long and hard and came up with a genius solution: they replaced the A&W 1/3 with the new A&W 3/9, which weighs 3/9 of a pound. It was a huge failure, because many people thought that 1/3 is less than 1/4, since 3 is less than 4. The Quarter Pounder weighs 1/4 pound (about 110 grams), and the campaign for the new sandwich emphasized that for the same price it contained 1/3 pound of meat. In the 1980s, the A&W company launched a new hamburger to compete with the popular block, from McDonalds. Marcelo Viana, director-general of the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics, published this week a good article in the Folha de São Paulo, Under the title “Who has an allergy to mathematics?”, he reported curious cases of this “allergy”, to avoid using a more appropriate word:

Is earth flat or is he round