In the 1940s, as MIT began to expand to West Campus, Don Whiston '32, MIT's associate director of physical-plant operations, created a grid that established a numbering sequence for additional buildings, using Memorial Drive as a baseline. In the 1960s, when Simha developed a master plan for future construction, he extended the grid to the east, north, northeast, and northwest sectors. Doling out numbers for new buildings is quite systematic--but there's some wiggle room. When the Stata Center was built where Building 20 once stood, it seemed sacrilegious to reuse the number, given Building 20's iconic status. Instead, a committee of faculty and administrators recommended the number 32. "Computer scientists typically do everything in powers of two," explains Professor John Guttag, who was then head of electrical engineering and computer science. They felt that their department's new building number should be a power of two--and 32 had for years been the standard number of bits in a typical computing "word." "It just seemed so right," he recalls. "It seemed almost like destiny that 32 was sitting there unused."

Although numbers clearly serve a practical purpose at the Institute, MIT students know how to have fun with them, too. For instance, when Building 7 opened in 1938, theTech reported that if the 8,500 cubic yards of cement used for the building were poured into 12-ounce beer cans, they would fill 18,250,000 of them--6,300 for each student. And on the night the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was released in 2005, hackers turned Building 9 into Building 9¾ in honor of the train platform Harry uses to get to the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Students relabeled office doors, classrooms, bathrooms, and even the mail room.

Simha thinks MIT's numbering culture reflects the value that people here place on logic and quantitative accuracy. And fluency in numberspeak is a matter of pride for students, he says. For Zhu, it's just more efficient. "MIT students like to shorten things," she says. And, she adds, it's a way of identifying yourself as an MIT person wherever you are--even at 30,000 feet.