Math & Numbers Facts for Kids

Hexagons are nature's most efficient shape — bees use them because hexagons pack together perfectly with no wasted space.

In 2002, a high school student proved you can fold a piece of paper in half up to 12 times if the paper is long enough.

The oldest known math word problems come from ancient Egypt and are about 3,800 years old — they include bread and beer calculations.

Computers do all their thinking using just two numbers: 0 and 1. This system is called binary.

There are 52 cards in a deck, 52 weeks in a year, and if you add up all the values of every card (ace=1, king=13), you get 364 — almost the days in a year.

The angles inside any triangle always add up to exactly 180 degrees, no matter what shape the triangle is.

If you divide 1 by 49, you get 0.020408163265... — the multiples of 2 appear in order (02, 04, 08, 16, 32, 65).

Archimedes figured out the value of pi over 2,200 years ago by drawing shapes with more and more sides inside a circle.

A Rubik's Cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations, but can always be solved in 20 moves or fewer.

The sum of the first N odd numbers always equals N squared: 1+3=4 (2²), 1+3+5=9 (3²), 1+3+5+7=16 (4²).