What's So Special About 72 Anyway? Where's Ramanujan When You Need Him?

January 15, 2007 by Sanjay.

In a CBS poll last year, over one-third of Americans confessed to bringing “teachings or philosophies from more than one religion into [their] own practices.” My own interest in cross-religious borrowing was piqued by the oft-invoked promise of 72 virgins that jihadis are apparently promised in a Muslim paradise. Recently though, my incipient aspirations to immortality have been seriously dampened by reading that (strangely like the Mars Rover accident) the whole virgins thing is probably one giant translation cock-up.

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