Page 257 - Mind Games The Aging Brain and How to Keep it Healthy

Enjoy Your Ageless Mental Agility • 241

for improving your ability to identify an anagram of a word.
By the way, trace is an anagram of crate. Did you find others?
Anagrams can be extended to complete phrases. By re-
D arranging the letters of Albert Einstein, Stephen Choi created
the anagram Ten elite brains. Using a software program
named Anagram Genius, Wendy A. Keen found nice ration
size to be an anagram of a senior citizen. Type in The best
things in life are free, and the program produces the anagram
Nail-biting refreshes the feet! We found these anagrams at
http://www.anagramgenius.com. You can visit the Web
site and get a list of anagrams for your name! You also might
enjoy the Anagram Hall of Fame at the Web location
http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/hof.html. Samples
there include dormitory and dirty room, as well as senior mo-
ment and I’m not Emerson.
D We would like to hear about your strategies for finding
anagrams. Go to this book’s Web site at http://www.
mentalagility.com. Access the Anagrams and Ana-
gramps menu item and send us your ideas. We’ll post new
strategies for other readers to read and use. You also will
find an option on the Web page for letting us know about
AnaGramps you have created. We’ll post the first ones we
receive from each reader.
@ This is an interesting note for math lovers on the possible
number of arrangements of a set of letters in a word. The
number of arrangements of letters in a word of all different
letters is calculated by a formula known as a factorial. Sup-
pose that there are five letters in a word. Imagine five
blanks: _ _ _ _ _ . Where might you place the first letter? You
have five choices. Then there are only four places left for the
second letter, three for the third letter, two for the fourth let-
ter, and then only one place remains for the last letter. Mul-
tiply 5 ´ 4 ´ 3 ´ 2 ´ 1. The result is 120. Mathematicians
devised shorthand for writing out this problem: 5!. The ex-
clamation point is read as “factorial.” 5! is read as “5 factor-
ial.” So 4! = 4 ´3 ´2 ´1. And 7! is 7 ´6 ´5 ´4 ´3 ´2 ´1. If
no letters are repeated, the number of possible rearrange-
ments for a word with n letters is n!