Amazing Maths - Crazy test

Maths has amazing things. You can make a seemingly simple test, but it will prove to be very interesting. Let's play this crazy test, shall we? 

- Think of a number from 1 to 9. 

- Then multiply that number by 9. 

- Sum the digits of the previous result. 

- To this sum, add 7. 

- Finally, divide by 4. 

- If each letter of the alphabet corresponds to a number in the following sequence (A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, etc..), find the letter corresponding to the number you found. 

- Then choose the European country that starts with this letter. To help you out, check the following list:

Albania                                                           Germany

Andorra                                                          Austria

Belgium                                                           Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bulgaria                                                          Croatia

Slovakia                                                         Denmark

Spain                                                             Slovenia

Estonia                                                          Russian Federation

France                                                           Finland

Greece                                                          Netherlands

Hungary                                                         Italy

Latvia                                                             Liechtenstein

Lithuanian                                                       Luxembourg

Macedonia                                                      Moldova

Monaco                                                          Montenegro

Norway                                                           Poland

Romania                                                           Portugal

San Marino                                                       Serbia

Sweden                                                            Switzerland

Ukraine                                                            Turkey

Vatican                                                             Cyprus

Ireland                                                              Iceland

UK                                                                  Malta

Scotland                                                           Northern Ireland

Wales

- After selecting a name beginning with the letter obtained, you should check what is the fourth letter of the name. Finally, you must choose an animal starts with that letter from the following list of animals :

lion

eagle

dog

monkey

chimpanzee

cat

elephant

giraffe

Now you wrote down the name of the country and the animal that resulted by the number you chose, check below the result of this crazy test.

Who knew that in Denmark there are monkeys ! :-)

Do you know what's the magic number?

The number 1089 is known as the magic number. Do you know why? 

To better understand why the number 1089 is the magic number, I'll ask you to choice any number that is composed of 3 different digits. For example, 286. 

Considering the number 286, you begin by writing 286 backwards. Then subtract the smaller number to the larger number: 

682-286 = 396 

Then you write the result backwards, and add up the two numbers: 

396 +693 = 1089 ---- magic number 

Fantastic, isn't it? 1089 is the magic number, and it works with all numbers composed by 3 distinct digits. But beware, if in the first step, the difference is, for example 099, when reverse that number you must count with the zero. In this case, 

453-354 = 099 

099 + 990 = 1089

Do you know who was Shakuntala Devi?

Born in Bangalore (India), Shakuntala Devi was, from a young age, a prodigy in mathematics. Often called the Human Computer, Shakuntala had calculation capabilities only seen on computers. 

In 1977, Shakuntala was able to mentally calculate the twenty-third root of a number of more than 200 digits in less than one minute. At the time, it was 12 seconds faster than the most powerful computers available at that time. In the same year, Shakuntala was able to mentally calculate the cube root of 188,132,517 faster than a computer. 

But their deeds do not stop there. Three years later, Shakuntala mentally calculated the product of two numbers chosen randomly, each with 13 digits. 

The true genius of maths mental calculation died last year, 2013, in April.