17
On 1 January 2012, a paper was released which answered the question: "How many clues do you need to solve a Sudoku?" The answer is 17.
Sudoku fans had found puzzles that could be solved with 17 clues, but they couldn't find any that could be solved with 16 or fewer. So they thought maybe 17 was the minimum number - but to prove that would involve taking every possible Sudoku solution and checking each one to see whether it could be solved for every possible starting position of 16 clues.
The total number of Sudoku
solutions is 6,700 million, million, million. For each of those, the
total number of 16-clue starting positions is 33 million billion.
So demonstrating that no Sudoku with 16 clues has a unique
solution is a massive problem. Even with a computer it was thought it
would take 300,000 years to check all the possibilities and to show that
none of them work. However, a mathematician called Gary McGuire at University College Dublin reduced the problem mathematically, then what he was left with he checked with a computer programme which ran for the whole of 2011. Then he released his result on 1 January 2012.
Not all Sudoku can be solved with just 17 clues but no Sudoku grids with 16 or fewer clues have just one unique solution.
5
Dr Pippa Wells, physicist at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research
In the 1960s, several theorists proposed a mechanism to give mass to fundamental particles.
Peter Higgs realised that the new field that
they needed would actually produce a new particle, the Higgs Boson. Over
the last decades people have been searching for the Higgs Boson and we
were really hoping that this year we could confirm it and announce the
discovery.
So my number for this year is five, because
in July 2012, the two big teams hunting the Higgs Boson at the Large
Hadron Collider both reported around a "5 sigma" level of certainty that
they had found a new particle.The formal threshold for claiming a discovery is a 5-sigma level - equivalent to a one-in-3.5 million probability that these results might actually be down to chance.
The two experiments also reported the discovery at the same mass value of around 125 gigaelectronvolts - about 125 times heavier than a hydrogen atom.
The fact that both experiments had seen it and with the same mass meant we were absolutely sure we had found something new.
80:20
Robert Peston, BBC business editor
My statistic of the year was given to me by Jean Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank. He told me about the 80:20 ratio for Europe and the 20:80 ratio for the United States.
What does that mean? It means that in Europe, roughly speaking, banks provide 80% of the finance needed by businesses and households. Whereas in the States banks provide only 20% of the finance required by businesses and households.
Why does this matter? This tells us a huge amount about the crisis in the eurozone and it also tells us a huge amount about why the economy of Britain and many economies in Europe in general have singularly failed to recover since the great crash of 2008, whereas although the American economy is not off to the races it has grown rather more strongly than the European economies.
Let's explain the significance of being so dependent on banks. When banks are weak, when they have a shortage of capital which is palpably true of many eurozone banks and arguably - according to the governor of the bank - true of British banks, they are reluctant to lend. What they try and do is actually shrink - to use the ghastly phrase, deleverage - and when banks deleverage and when money isn't going to households and businesses those households and businesses can't spend, they can't invest and frankly the economy can't grow.
And also when you have banks playing such an important role it turns out banks are enormous, they're so big that when they get into trouble even governments like the Spanish government find it very difficult to afford to bail them out.
So the 80:20 ratio tells you two fantastically important things. It tells you why the European economy has been so sluggish and also tells you why governments like Spain and Ireland have been on the brink of bankruptcy because their banks are so big they can't afford to rescue them.
1,901
Jack Straw, MP for Blackburn, UK
My number is 1,901. That is the number of road fatalities in 2011 in the UK.
It's interesting, in my opinion, because it illustrates the dramatic improvement in road safety that has happened in the last 40 years and the last 80 years.
There was one fatality for every 280 vehicles in the road 80 years ago. It's now one fatality for every 17,800 vehicles.
As a result of controversial measures like the breathalyser and seat belts, and the improved safety of vehicles and junctions, the number of fatalities has dropped from a peak of around 8,000 40 years ago to below 2,000, even though the number of vehicles has shot up.
18
Gillian Tett, Financial Times
In my opinion, the most eye-popping statistic in 2012 was the amount of money that the Americans spent on their election.
They spent $2.5bn (£1.54bn) on the direct presidential campaign but when you throw in all the money for the Senate races and the House of Representatives you end up with about $6bn dollars of total spending on the campaigns.
If you work it out per person in the US, it's about $18 (£11). The last general election in the UK was $0.80 (50p) per person and the last Canadian election was about $8 per person.
However there's a rather interesting catch. If you look at the sheer size of the US economy and the amount invested in elections, then the American number may not be so large after all.
My other eye-popping statistic of the year was that Americans spent $7bn on potato chips this year and about $8bn on the Halloween celebrations.
There are some people then who say that spending around $6bn on an election is not that bad, especially when you compare it to the other things that Americans could spend money on in a consumer culture.
source: BBC
