42 and Douglas Adams - Numberphile

Douglas Adams - who would have turned 60 on March 11 - immortalised the number 42 in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
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Forty-two was calculated by Deep Thought!

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[horchcorpse]

M (13th letter of the alphabet)
A (1st)
T (20th)
H (8th)
= 42

[bsabruzzo]

42 has to be mystical. It is said that every human over the age of 43 has been age 42. Coincidence? I think not.

[MountainHawkPYL]

According to the books, 42 is not the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. It is the "answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything."

[shikhanshu]

According to Douglas Adams himself:

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story.

<wikipedia>

[stevecarter]

I like the way Douglas Adams basically said "It's the job of everyone on earth to make sense out of existence, a job they will fail at" and everyone's running around finding significance in the shape of the apostrophe of the initial "It's"

[danohanlon]

The British writer, author, speaker, actor, intellectual, Stephen Fry, was one of Douglas Adams’s closest friends. Ten or fifteen years or so ago during one of his many interviews on British television, Fry was asked about Adams and the mystical number Forty-two.

Fry said this (I paraphrase.)

“Under a promise of absolute confidentiality, Douglas told me the answer; and it’s right there in plain sight—right under everybody’s noses. If only they would look! Its incredibly simple. And it’s brilliant.”

There is one such simple ~ish analysis which, although a prime contender I still think is wrong; but it postulates that the ASCII code, 42, creates an asterisk (*)—hinting that “42” can mean “anything you want it to mean.” (Source unknown.) That, however being not quite as “simple” as Fry indicated, I think I can beat it.

(Spoiler:)

In “The Hitchikers Guide, ” the key to the whole saga turns out to be the mice! What do mice do all day—every day? They make more mice.

The answer “to life, the Universe, and Everything” is not “forty-two”; its “for - two.”

Life is for two.

The answer is “Love!”

[finn_underwood]

Common misconception: 42 is the answer to the *GREAT QUESTION OF* life, the Universe, and everything. It is *NOT* the answer to life, the universe, and everything. That was a crucial part of the joke. The supercomputer had to calculate the answer to the question without knowing the question, and arrived at 42. As is later revealed, the question that Earth produced, albeit skewed due to golgafrinchans, was "What do you get when you multiply six by nine."
As Arthur says, "I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe."

[steffenblake]

In unicode, character #42 (0x00A2) is the * symbol, which is used a wildcard symbol in programming and computer languages.

So life is what you make of it, and it can be anything you want it to be.

[xorcyst]

Douglas Adams also knew a thing or two about programming, and in programming an asterisk is commonly used to translate to "anything you want it to be". In ASCII, "42" is the designation for an asterisk, so in asking a computer to come up with the ultimate answer to "life, the universe and everything", it answered as a computer would, 42 = "anything you want it to be" so on top of it being just funny and random and everything else its presented as, it actually has a deeper meaning if you know what to look for.

[anasaloudeh]

The meaning of life=MATH
M: 13th letter
A: 1st letter
T: 20th letter
H: 8th letter

13+1+20+8=42!

[deaglanquinn]

I really like the idea (though seeming coincidence) that 42 degrees is the angle that light is refracted by rain drops forming a rainbow. The General Mish Mash is just the minute particle back drop of the universe and your angle of perspective dictates how you see life.

[RFC]

No, Douglas Adams never said he chose 42 "because it was a funny number", on the contrary. He said he chose 42 because it was a boring number, and he didn't want to hide the "big joke" (that the answer to life is simply a number) behind a "small joke" (i.e., a funny or "weird" number). So he picked a number that sounded as ordinary and as boring as possible. He mentioned this in several interviews and (I think) in "The Salmon of Doubt".

Unfortunately, a lot of people (including many Douglas Adams fans) completely miss the point, and keep trying to find something funny about 42.

The joke is that it's simply a number, not which number it is.

[cagedlemp]

"What number is funnier than 42?"
25. 

[ciarasookarry]

The video is 8 minutes and 42 seconds long!!! :0

[RaineQi]

It's been 3 years that I found this video that got me hooked on maths videos. Nice little reunion in quarantine

[ninjatomic]

@ sine moderamine
"If you put 42 on the surface of an atom, would that make it a Douglas atom?"

Lol! You, sir, win an internetz.

[michaelmeissner]

42 isn't the answer to life, the universe, and everything! It's the answer to _the ultimate question_ of life, the universe, and everything!

[AgglomeratiProduzioni]

Hi, I'm an Italian guy, and I'm proud to be from Anzio, Rome!
Why? Because Anzio's italian postal code is 00042 and its coordinates are about 42°N!

[dementy]

The funniest part about the number 42 is that fans of the books are looking for a deeper meaning in it, while there is just nothing. It is the same thing as looking for the ultimate question. There is no chance of finding one, only thing you can do is just theorize about it. How beautiful, Douglass...

[static]

"What number is funnier than 42?"
How does your mind not instantly jump to 69?