GoKawiilClassic 'four twos' math puzzle traced to Dirac's general solution from the 1920s
The piece revisits a long-running recreational math puzzle: using exactly four instances of the digit 2 and any mathematical operations to construct any target natural number. It walks through increasingly advanced solutions—from basic arithmetic to exponents, factorials, concatenation tricks, and the Gamma function—before noting that physicist Paul Dirac devised a general method using nested square roots and logarithms that can produce any number, effectively solving the puzzle completely.