42

Today we celebrate our 42nd wedding anniversary. On April 3, 1982, on a cold and blustery day in Vermilion, Ohio, we were married–and the rest is history.

42 is a pretty important number, as numbers go. Any baseball fan will tell you that it is the immortal Jackie Robinson’s number–which is why there is a movie named, simply, “42.” It’s a number that therefore has come to signify a step toward equality, fairness, and opportunity and a stand against bigotry, prejudice, and oppression.

Fans of the Douglas Adams novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy also attach great significance to the number 42. In that book, the supercomputer Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years to determine the answer to the “Great Question” of “Life, the Universe and Everyhing” and the answer is, simply, “42.” You can get a sense of the broad impact of Adams’ book by a simple test: if you ask many search engines “what is the answer to everything?” you’ll undoubtedly see references to “42.”

Because of that reference and a long-standing math puzzle first posed in 1954, “42” has become a touchstone number for math geeks. Math geeks also will tell you that 42 is a pronic number, because it is the product of two consecutive integers (6 x 7) and a Harshad number, because it is divisible by the sum of its digits (4 + 2 = 6). 42 is a significant number in chemistry, religion, and ancient cultures, too.

It’s nice to know that this anniversary marks such a significant number, because 42 has obviously been an important number for us. We will happily celebrate that number today.