When I go to Europe, my pockets rapidly fill up with change. In addition to language barriers that prevent me from quickly understanding how much I owe, I have trouble dealing with the unfamiliar coin denominations. The best way to make 75 cents is to use a fifty cent piece, one twenty, and a five, not three quarters. But I have trouble remembering that on the fly. The one- and two-euro coins further confuse the issue for me, as I reach for a bill rather than coins for a three euro transaction. In the airport on the way home, I generally try to convert as many of my amassed coins to duty-free chocolate as possible, but I often come home with quite a few coins jingling in my pocket anyway.
In the states, I try to avoid using coins in my everyday life. I rarely carry a purse, and my wallet doesn’t have a coin pocket, so they just clang around in my pockets. I let my non-quarters accumulate in a repurposed coffee can, and every few years I count them up and treat myself to a sandwich or something. The quarters are immediately diverted to the laundry fund.
In a paper posted to the preprint site arXiv.org on June 9, mathematicians Lara Pudwell of Valparaiso University and Eric Rowland of the University of Quebec at Montreal tackled the question of how many coins people have sitting around. They used statistical techniques to determine that a typical carrier of US currency is most likely carrying 10 coins at any given time: 1 quarter, 1 dime, 1 nickel, and 7 pennies. If, like me, you save your coins instead of spending them, then it’s likely that about 31.9 percent of your piggybank contents are quarters, 17 percent are dimes, 8.5 percent are nickels, and 42.6 percent are pennies.
Read the full post at Roots of Unity.
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