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Is there an online database that contains numeric facts (world population, number of inches in a yard, lbs in a metric ton, ect)?

I'm specifically interested in numeric facts. It can be any subject. The more facts (100s, 1000s, the better)! The more interesting, the better.

Patrick Hoefler
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user2001
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5 Answers5

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I think the highest quality database you can find is wikipedia. Now bear with me for a moment: for every article wikipedia usually provides a very vast set of numeric facts along with the textual facts. The only thing you have to do is to download a wikipedia dump and using the markup language that wikipedia uses, extract the numeric facts.

Adrian Morce
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    +1 Most of these Wikipedia numeric facts are easily queryable remotely using WikiData, which is much more convenient than downloading dumps. See for instance http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22175896/how-to-get-list-of-statements-for-given-wididata-id – Nicolas Raoul Nov 19 '14 at 07:17
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Have a look at Numbers API. It has some very interesting facts about numbers and even dates. For each request of the form http://numbersapi.com/49 it returns a random trivia that refers to that number:

49 is the number of days and night Siddhartha Gautama spent meditating as a holy man.

And, of course:

42 is the result given by the web search engines Google, Wolfram Alpha and Bing when the query "the answer to life the universe and everything" is entered as a search.

By appending /date, /year, /trivia or /math to the number, the specific statements referring to the day of the year (e.g. 4th of July) or the year (e.g. 1492) can be returned.

ojdo
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bosco-
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I don't expect one database to contain population data AND unit conversions (which isn't really "data"). But it sounds like you are looking for what would be found in a World Almanac.

I'd search/browse the API Dashboard. I didn't find any hits with 'almanac' as a search term, but that would be where I would start.

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philshem
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From what you've described, Wolfram Alpha might be what you're looking for.

They have a no-cost API that allows 2000 'non-commercial' uses per month, but I couldn't find any details on what they consider 'non-commercial' to be.

Joe
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Wikipedia's strange affection for lists of factoids sometimes comes very handy. Try by starting with the simple List of numbers for interesting numbers, constants and peculiar values.

Then continue on Orders of magnitude (numbers), which lists some random quantities from demography to mathematics for quantities from 10-10 to 10100 (and beyond). Two random picks:

  • Mathematics: The probability of rolling snake eyes 10 times in a row on a pair of fair dice is about 2.74×10−16
  • Chess: 4.52×1046 is a proven upper bound for the number of legal chess positions.

Bonus: at the bottom, the info box Template:Orders of magnitude links to lists in other articles for "typical values" of many physical quantities like speed (from walking to space crafts), sound pressure (breathing to grenades), ...

ojdo
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