Mathematically Inspired Variants
Donald Byrd has collected dozens of variants inspired by mathematical concepts and written by himself and others. (A subset of his collection has been published as Byrd (2010, September).) Byrd argues the collection has pedagogic as well as amusement value. Among his variants are:
- "Infinite bottles of beer on the wall". If one bottle is taken down, there are still infinite bottles of beer on the wall (thus creating an unending sequence much like "The Song That Never Ends").
- "Aleph-Null bottles of beer on the wall". Aleph-Null is the size of the set of all natural numbers, and is the smallest infinity and the only countable one.
- "Uncountable bottles of beer on the wall". An uncountably infinite set is larger than a countable one; therefore, if only a countable infinity of bottles fall, an uncountable number remains.
Other versions in Byrd's collection involve concepts including geometric progressions, differentials, Euler's identity, complex numbers, summation notation, the Cantor set, the Fibonacci series, and the Continuum Hypothesis, among others.
On an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, on a way to the mathematics competition Malcolm's classmates - the Krelboynes - sing a variation of this song stating "the square root of (number) of bottles of beer". Malcolm states to the camera that they are only at the nineties.
Read more about this topic: 99 Bottles Of Beer
Famous quotes containing the words inspired and/or variants:
“The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)