When we heard that the MTA was spending $212 million to install surveillance cams in the New York subway, we immediately wondered if there was some kind of geeky joke in there somewhere. 212, after all, is the area code for Manhattan.

Keep in mind that when Google decided to raise money in its IPO last year, the company's founders settled on the magic number of $2.718 billion for a reason:

"The amount of the $2.7 billion offering contains an inside joke for the math-minded. The exact offering, $2,718,281,828, is the product of "e" and $1 billion, where "e" is the base of the natural logarithm--a logarithm especially useful in calculus--and equals about 2.718281828."

Then, when Google announced that it planned to offer more shares to the public, it settled on the magic number of 14,159,265 shares for obvious reasons:

"And why, oh why, the strange numerology -- selling exactly 14,159,265 shares, which every educated 13-year-old recognizes as the digits to the right of the decimal point in the mathematical term pi."

Maybe it's one for Carl Bialik, who writes "The Numbers Guy" column for The Wall Street Journal, to ponder...