There is a fifth, I suppose, but it does fall on the 1st of May 93843

Playing around with numbers is, unfortunately, one of the activities to which you're more or less doomed if you're a reasonably methodical and technical type of person. (I'm aware that the technical term for this is "geek". Don't hate me because I'm stereotyped.) The internet does make it surprisingly easy to indulge this type of activity, especially if you combine it with more concrete concepts such as the date. This leads me to the main point of this post, which is to say that this coming Saturday is my next Prime Day.

Prime Days are an idea that surely can't be original to me, although I can't say I've ever heard of them before. Essentially, you first need to work out how many days you've been alive. This would usually be somewhat tedious, but luckily the internet allows you to do such things in a flash with handy tools like the Online Age Calculator - it turns out that, at the time of writing, I'm 8049 days old. Then all you need do is compare that number with a list of prime numbers. Here's an excerpt from the list - it indicates that the next prime number above 8049 is 8053, so my next Prime Day is 4 days away. They're obviously not very widely spaced, so I'm not planning on doing anything special - it's just one of those little mathematical tweaks that make things marginally more interesting.

Even if Prime Days aren't all that amazing, there's a couple more types of day along the same lines which are rather more fun. For those interested in nature, there's the Fibonacci Days. The Fibonacci sequence is the one that everyone learns in secondary school - it pops up all over the place in nature - and its numbers get progressively further and further apart, meaning that they're sparse enough once you're into larger numbers that things get a little more interesting. In my case, my next Fibonacci day, calculated by the ever-useful Online Days Added calculator, will be the 13th of April 2015. One for the diary, then.

Probably the most interesting (and certainly the rarest) of this type of events must be the Perfect Days. The perfect numbers are very much few and far between - indeed, given the normal lifespan of a person, you'll only ever get four Perfect Days in your entire life. My first two went past at a time when I wasn't really in a position to notice much - 6 days old and 28 days old - and the third, at a year and a bit, wasn't much better. My fourth and final Perfect Day, though - day 8128 - will fall on the 26th of July this year. I'll try to keep an eye open and report on whether my numerological gymnastics are reflected in the events of the day!

Obviously, this is the kind of thing that you shouldn't take too seriously. There's nothing inherently special about our number system, or mathematics, for that matter - in fact, maths is probably the only subject where all of the phenomena discovered are natural consequences of the entirely arbitrary system we've chosen - but those consequences have been very important to a huge number of people throughout history. This is just my way of getting involved. And, of course, it's also going to be my way of becoming fantastically rich by selling mathematically-themed greetings cards. It will happen. Oh, yes. It will happen.