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13 subtle, clever math jokes Google has made publicly that probably went right over your head

13 subtle, clever math jokes Google has made publicly that probably went right over your head

It all started with the IPO. Google used a funny string of numbers in its initial S-1 filing for how much it hoped to raise...

Then, a year later, Google collected a bit more than $4 billion dollars by selling 14,159,265 million of its shares.

Get it? "14,159,265" are the first eight digits after the decimal point in pi.

The search giant showed off its numerical whimsy again in 2011 when it bid $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128 for some wireless patents.

In case those numbers don't instantly ring a bell: They're Brun's constant and the Meissel-Mertens constant, respectively.

Google didn't end up winning the patents, but it definitely mystified other bidders.

In another auction, Google spent $25 million to buy the entire ".app" domain. But the clever part came when we followed up with the company about it...

”We’ve been excited and curious about the potential for new top-level domains (TLDs) for .soy long," a Google spokesperson told Business Insider in a pun-riddled email. "We are very .app-y with .how, at a .minna-mum, they have the potential to .foo-ward internet innovation.”

The company has also responded to press questions with memes. It sent The Verge this one when it revealed that a weird skull showing up in people's Gmail accounts was caused by a bug in its own in-house debugger.

Source: The Verge

Google once even got a little risqué with this response...

Read the story over at Inverse.

And once it addressed an issue where Google Maps was showing Sauron's tower from "Lord of the Rings" as appearing Australia with a comment... in Elvish:

"If your Elvish is a bit rusty, here is a rough translation," the spokesperson said. "We encourage users to contribute their local knowledge and updates using Google Map Maker, even the whims of Sauron will not compromise our quest to provide useful and accurate maps."

Google has recruited new developers using super-cryptic challenges that people can only access through a secret website...

And when Business Insider reached out to Google about this recruiting technique, we received the following response:

" import string

z=string.ascii_lowercase

m=''.join([z[6],z[11],z[7],z[5]])

print(m) "

The message? "GLHF," which stands for "Good Luck, Have Fun!"

A few months after Google became Alphabet in 2015, it bought the entire alphbabet as a domain name, with the URL abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com

"We realized we missed a few letters in abc.xyz, so we’re just being thorough," a spokesperson told Re/code.

In the same vein, Alphabet also bought back a bunch of stock for $5,099,019,513.59.

That's the square root of 26, the number of letters in the alphabet, times a billion.

... A fact that the company made sure to reference last year after the press noted that new parent company Alphabet didn't include Google's famous "don't be evil" line in its new code of conduct.

After The Wall Street Journal's Alistair Barr caught the change, the company sent him a cheeky response:

"Individual Alphabet companies may of course have their own codes to ensure they continue to promote compliance and great values,” a Google spokesman said. “But if they start bringing cats to work, there’s gonna be trouble with a capital T.”

Not about numbers but pretty funny: In its official code of conduct, Google declares itself a 'dog company.'

"Google’s affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture," reads the company's code of conduct on its investor relations site. "We like cats, but we’re a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out."

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