The I-Gave-Away-$1-Billion Club

Take the quiz. How many living people have donated at least $1 billion to charity?

I'll give you a hint: The answer is the third discrete biprime number.

Not into math?

It is also the atomic number of silicon. What? Flunked chemistry?

Okay then. The answer is the number of Stations of the Cross. Oh, you're Buddhist?

You'll get this for sure: This is the youngest age that a child can emancipate him- or herself from his or her parents in the United States.

No? For sports fans, then: This is the retired number of former baseball players Pete Rose, Jim Bunning and Ernie Banks.

Well if you haven't gotten it yet, I give up. The answer's 14. Which is also apparently the number of legs on a woodlouse, the number of lines in a sonnet and the number of pounds in the British unit of weight measure called a stone. (This, my friends, is what Wikipedia is good for.)

Now, according to Forbes magazine, this is also the number of living philanthropists in the I-gave-away-$1-billion club.

Bill Gates, no surprise, is at the top of the list, with $28 billion in donations to his name. George Soros has given $7.2 billion, and Warren Buffett clocks in with $6.7 million. Ten of the 14 are American. Among those who aren't is the list's only Asian person, Li Ka-shing, the richest person in Hong Kong.

Perhaps it's not a coincidence that German Roman Catholics venerated 14 Holy Helpers during the 14th century?

Photo courtesy of stock.xchng