Monk's Dream

Welcome back to Tea with Liya! Today, I'm playing a jazz song called "Monk's Dream," which was named after its composer, Thelonious Monk. In my blog post, I'm also talking about some happy numbers we can find during the pandemic - and maybe happy dreams, too! Thanks for coming to listen!


Listen to the song here
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With the coronavirus still floating over our heads (although it's becoming easier to forget about now), along with the cloud cover that seems to return day after day, it might be easy to say that not many good things are happening. "New year, new coronavirus. Just what we didn't want."

Paper calendar - free images from pixabay.com

However, I might be able to use some math to change how you think about this year. Recently, I was reading about happy numbers, which you can find by adding the squares of their digits together.

Okay, I'll explain. If you have the number 68, you would then write it as 6² + 8², which you can turn into 36 + 64 = 130.

Then you'd take the resulting number and add up the squares again. 1² + 3² + 0² = 1 + 9 + 0 = 10.
1² + 0² = 1 + 0 = 1.
1² = 1. Nothing else is going to happen, so I'll explain what I'm doing with these. For any number that you choose, if you keep adding up the squares of the digits, you'll either eventually get the number 1 (in which case the sum would end, since there's nothing more to see but 1^2 = 1), or your results would fall into a cycle that repeats forever. We don't want to be spinning in an endless time loop, so the number is happy if the sum eventually reaches 1.

I'm going to try it with another number - 13. You might think that 13 will be an unhappy number, since it has so many negative connotations. Buildings might not have a 13th floor. 13 is the year when those teenagers start appearing. You can't trust them with anything, right? It would only be a use of common sense to say that 13 is an unhappy number.

Let's see. 1² + 3² = 1 + 9 = 10.

1² + 0² = 1. That was faster than even I was expecting! Are you sure I did it properly? Here's how you can find out. If I did 68 properly, then you can also trust this one because 130 has the same result as 13. Adding 0 doesn't change anything.

You could say that 13 isn't an unlucky number after all because it resolves down to 1. 13 is also the year when a new stage of life starts. I could also argue that 13 is unbreakable. Why? It's a prime number - it can only be divided by itself!

If we can change our minds about a universally feared number like 13, then why can't we change our minds about COVID? Of course there are bad things about the pandemic, but we do need some good news, too. Maybe something good is going to happen that couldn't have happened without COVID - being prepared for a more dangerous pandemic, for example.

They say that April showers bring May flowers, so maybe May coronaviruses bring . . . walks in the sunshine in June? You never know what's coming, so it's better to think on the bright side than to complain. And don't put down your pencil even when there's a long day of writing numbers in front of you. You might just find a happy number!

Keep filling your teacup with music!

~Liya