Road Sign Math

The Peoples Republic of China, with over 1.3 billion people, makes it’s first posting of a mathematically significant roadsign with a somewhat controversial sign. The sign was submitted by an American traveling abroad, Aaron Oliver, who got this picture outside of Qingdao heading towards town from somewhere near the TsingTao brewery. Perhaps the brewery connection explains the blurry picture. Actually he snapped this from a cab and since he couldn’t say “Road Sign Math” in Mandarin he wasn’t able to get the driver to pull over.

This sign is controversial because of the clear implications of Rule E that disallows tautologies. However, 1 is a very special number in that you can apply a handful of mathematical functions to 1, and simply return 1. There was some debate in the Road Sign Math judging community on wether applying a random function to a 1 to simply return a 1 wasn’t still indeed a tautology, however, we were unable to determine other simple tautologies that you could do this with, besides 1 and 1. In this way, a double 1 sign turns into something of a special case, but a winner none-the-less.

\sqrt{1} = 1

This sign is found outside of Qingdao heading into town. See sign on map!