A random digit like $7$, a random prime like $57$, and when in doubt, $42$.

A non-trivial amount of time spent on my CS assignments goes towards choosing which of my favourite numbers gets to be $N$ on the next test case, over and over again.

But some poor numbers have never been $N$.

Back-of-the-envelope, the UW website claims under $40{,}000$ math alumni, who ought to have taken no more than $10$ CS courses each with $10$ assignments per course with $5$ questions per assignment and $50$ opportunities to choose $N$ per question.

Even if they chose a different positive integer each time, we’re still not even halfway to using up every available $\mathrm{int}$.

My new favourite non-falsifiable (for now) theory is that there is a very special lonely $N$ plucked out of obscurity by the first CS prof, scribbled on a yellowing sticky note in a vault on the seventh floor of MC, and a long standing bet in the department on how long until one of us monkeys uses it.

Or maybe a mathNEWS listicle will get it first.

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I vividly remember being at my first mathNEWS production night, racking my brains for what to write while also being astonished by the various idiosyncrasies that they don’t tell you about until you show up. After an hour of half brainstorming, half goofing around with my friends, this was the debut of the eventually-legendary mathNEWS writer “water”. As testament to its brevity and quality, it appears on the 28^th page with three other listicles… It is the worst piece of writing that I’d still be okay with putting up on my website, mainly for historical reasons. Everyone starts somewhere.