One of my YC batchmates had his company acquired by Google. They quickly shut down his product (shocking!) and had him product manage Google Fi instead. He gave me access to the beta about 7 years ago. At that time, you could search for any string of numbers and it would let you see available numbers containing that string. I was able to get a number with 4 consecutive zeros in it and to this day it brings me joy every time I see or share it. Most people are not as amused but every now and then I'll meet someone who lights up when they see it. Without fail, they were also a math nerd growing up. I guess numbers tickle some people's brains differently.
Google Voice had the same feature years ago. It's how I have an all prime number with triple 7s in the middle as my GVoice number.
I also have my cell phone number that I used a new GVoice account to be able to search for. Got a 799-4999 like number by searching for three consecutive numbers and that popped up. Ported that out to my cell a few weeks later.
I don't actually live or work in my home state, but I keep the same rural area code. Less spam overall and when I get a call from a home state area code that's not in my contacts, I can safely ignore it as being spam.
At first I thought you might've slightly leaked your phone number here, but there's surprisingly many 10 digit prime numbers with a triple-7 in the middle (and obviously that inner 777 can't be next to a 7 else you'd call it a quadruple-7 [etc]), 1905394.
If you filter on only valid area codes, the number is a bit smaller (620350), and if you exclude Toll Free, Reserved, and Government area codes it's down to 567277.
Absolutely agree. Having a number that brings joy to a specific group of people is way better than having an obvious "lots of X digits" kind of number. I had a mobile phone for 10+ years that was composed of a sequence of 2-digit perfect square numbers. Like 6481-1649 for example. I have many many friends that to this day can call my old number just by remembering the square roots which were pretty easy to memorize. Funny thing happened when the whole country added a leading 9 digit to increase the amount of possible users in the network. It was just sweet because it meant an extra 3 as a square root to my number.
I've moved to a different country a few years later so I lost that number but at least I managed to transfer it to a good friend who appreciated the math part of it. He still gets calls, many years later, from friends looking up for me.
I got my number the same way from Google Fi when it was publicly available, in xxyyyyzaab format. In my country, having a number like that usually means you have good "connections."
I’m not a big math nerd, but I’m also a programmer so maybe I have an slanted bias of what that means. Being ND also helps. I would love to see four consecutive numbers. I have kept two numbers around to now with 2 and 3 consecutive same digits. So XYY-ZYYY numbers without area code. With area code they are AYB-XYY-ZYYY for two diff area codes. I’d love giving up any Y overlap if the last four can be consecutive especially if it’s 4.
My phone number ends in 32768. That was the highest power of two available. Funny thing is that until then, 2¹⁵ had been the only power of two from 0–16 that I didn’t clearly remember. Now I’ve got them all!
When I signed up for google voice I searched the last 4 of my cell number, and I got the last 4, and the first 3, and middle 3 was x+2, y, z+2 so it it almost as close as possible to my actual cell. At the time I didn’t think to search for more interesting combinations of numbers, I realize how short-sighted that was now. Oh well.
I've currently got a phone number and to my surprise its
0x+y=z a+y=c a*a=b
You can probably figure out the last 3 numbers.
Ok now that i've made all of the same numbers the same variable there isn't that many combinations. Cool.
