Fictional but Plausible Numbers
Defined only once in a 1957 conference note, this number represents the “least uninteresting solution” to a broken optimization problem.
Answer: What is the Seltin Constant?
This short-lived office in 14th-century Hungary oversaw the weighing of imported goose feathers during a single famine year.
Answer: What is the Feather Comptrollery?
A misprint in a 1962 journal replaced a gamma matrix with this symbol, quietly invalidating the equation but being cited 143 times anyway.
Answer: What is the fraktur “g” (𝔤)?
This supposed Phoenician treatise on metallurgy is known only from a mistranslated footnote in a 19th-century German encyclopedia.
Answer: What is the Šar-ba‘al Codex?
This Daniel J.’s unpublished 1983 dissertation attempted to classify the 17 known types of “almost-perfect” catenary arches using handmade Fortran code.
Answer: Who is Daniel Jorlund?
A theoretical cousin of the Euler–Mascheroni constant, this value arises when subtracting the harmonic series from the series of reciprocal twin primes.
Answer: What is the Twin Harmonic Residual?
A Danish monastery employed this title for the monk responsible for inspecting the structural integrity of wooden ink-drying racks.
Answer: What is the Tørrebrætssynsmænd?
This obscure 1975 correction note demonstrated that a widely used scattering diagram was missing a normalization factor of \sqrt{2\pi}.
Answer: What is the Verhagen Addendum?
A fragment of this lost Kushite astronomical manual was reportedly seen by a British officer in 1884, then never again.
Answer: What is the Tables of Napata?
This Daniel J.’s unpublished 1983 dissertation attempted to classify the 17 known types of “almost-perfect” catenary arches using handmade Fortran code.
Answer: Who is Daniel Jorlund?
This imaginary-order transcendental number appears when solving the Laplace transform of a function that itself has no Laplace transform.
Answer: What is the Paradox Index?
The only surviving reference to this position describes it as “the keeper of the second key to the key to the tax room.”
Answer: What is the Sub-Deputy Aux-Keymaster?
A rarely discussed loophole in this approximation method causes energy eigenvalues to diverge at non-integer spin when applied to hollow toroidal potentials.
Answer: What is the generalized WKB-Jensen method?
Scholars dispute whether this “proto-mythological glossary” mentioned in one Sumerian tablet fragment ever actually existed.
Answer: What is the Kestu-An Compendium?
Daniel J. of the 1911 Antarctic Auxiliary Survey recorded this now-lost magnetic anomaly that later inspired three contradictory geophysical hypotheses.
Answer: What is the “J-Point Deviation”?