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If I was a maths teacher or Carol Vorderman, I might be able to tell you some interesting facts about these numbers, how they might be the square root of pi, or the cosine of a triangle the size of the Eiffel Tower.

But I am not a maths teacher, or Carol Vorderman. I can't even remember what a cosine is - the only time I have ever needed to was for doing maths homework at school.

I used to be quite good at maths when I was a kid. I didn't enjoy it, but I was good at it. I even did my maths GCSE a year early and got an A grade. Naive youth that I was, I figured this meant I could now have a well deserved year off from the chore of maths lessons. But no, my prize was in fact to have a whole extra year of even harder maths lessons.

Its no wonder I gave up on it, along with the majority of my fellow classmates. The truth of this finally dawned on our maths teacher the day he discovered that the entire class had copied their homework off of one kid with glasses. He found this out because that kid had got it wrong, and he went round the whole classroom following a chain of confessions as he asked each child who he had copied from.

I sometimes wonder what that teacher was thinking at the time, discovering that his brightest students, the top of the whole school who had taken their exam a year early, actually hated his subject to such an extent that they instigated a homework mutiny. He was so stunned that he didn't even punish us.

Needless to say I didn't do so well on my subsequent higher maths exam, and didn't bother following it any further. I've always been fascinated by numbers and the thruths they unlock about the world around us, but its definitely a spectator sport for me.

I think I will leave it to Carol Vorderman to uncover the secrets of the universe.