40 ...

Today marks 40 days of waiting for information on Miss Rebecca. I know the number 40 is significant in some religious traditions so for fun, I looked up some facts on wikipedia.

• "Forty days and forty nights" describes the period for which rain fell during Noah's flood
• "Forty days"was the length of the period that the twelve spies explored the Promised Land (Numbers 13)
• "Forty years" was the length of Israel's wandering in the wilderness. This period of years represents a generation, that is, the time it takes for a new generation to arise.
• Moses' life is divided into three 40-year segments, separated by his fleeing from Egypt, and his return to lead the people out.

But did you know, forty is an octagonal number, and as the sum of the first four pentagonal numbers, it is a pentagonal pyramidal number. Adding up some subsets of its divisors (e.g., 1, 4, 5, 10 and 20) gives 40, hence 40 is a semiperfect number.
Given 40, the Mertens function returns 0. 40 is the smallest number n with exactly 9 solutions to the equation φ(x) = n.
Forty is the number of n-queens problem solutions for n = 7.
Since the greatest prime factor of 402 + 1 = 1601 is prime and obviously more than 40 twice, 40 is a Størmer number.
40 is a repdigit in base 3 (1111) and a Harshad number in base 10.

And even better: "To understand a people, you must live among them for 40 days. ~Arabic proverb"

40 more days like this & I'm not so sure any of my friends are going to remain understanding :-)

Anyone ready to go back to Emma pix?