1,998 is worth including here mostly in the interest of honesty: it doesn't carry any major named mathematical property the way a perfect number or a Carmichael number does, and it's more useful as a genuine calendar-year reference point than as a mathematically remarkable value in its own right — a deliberately unglamorous entry included to demonstrate what an ordinary integer's fact sheet actually looks like, rather than stretching for significance that isn't really there.
The Plain Arithmetic
As a plain integer, 1,998 factors as 2 × 3³ × 37 — giving it sixteen divisors total (1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 18, 27, 37, 54, 74, 111, 222, 333, 666, 999, and 1998), following from the standard divisor-counting formula applied to its prime factorization ((1+1)×(3+1)×(1+1)=16). It's even, composite, not a perfect square (44²=1936 and 45²=2025 bracket it), and it carries none of the triangular, Fibonacci, or perfect-number properties covered elsewhere on this site. Interestingly, its factorization contains 666 as a visible sub-factor (3 × 3 × 37 × 2 regroups as 2×333=666×3, and indeed 1998 = 3 × 666 exactly) — a small, purely arithmetic curiosity rather than any deeper significance.
What Actually Happened in 1998
As a calendar year, 1998 carries a modest amount of genuine, documented significance: it's the year Google was formally incorporated (in September 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, following their earlier research work at Stanford), a company whose later dominance in web search would go on to shape how billions of people find information daily. It's also the year the 1998 FIFA World Cup was held in France, won by the host nation in the final against Brazil — a widely followed global sporting event that year, and one of the more significant international footballing milestones of the late 1990s.
In Roman numerals, 1,998 is written MCMXCVIII — a genuinely dense example of subtractive notation, using three separate subtractive pairs in a row (CM for 900, XC for 90, and a final run building to 8 via VIII rather than a fourth subtractive pair) directly following the site's own Roman numeral conversion rules: M(1000) + CM(900) + XC(90) + VIII(8) = 1998.
Why an Unremarkable Number Belongs Here
There's a genuine, useful lesson in including a number like 1,998 alongside more mathematically celebrated entries on this list: most integers, including most years, simply don't carry a rare, named mathematical property — perfect numbers, Carmichael numbers, and taxicab numbers are exceptional precisely because they're uncommon, and a page that manufactured false significance for every single number covered here would undermine the credibility of the genuine claims made about numbers that really do have documented, checkable properties. 1,998 is, honestly, mostly just a calendar year — and that's a completely fine, accurate thing for a number's story to be.
Google's 1998 incorporation is itself worth a small additional note of precision: the company traces its origins to a research project (initially called "BackRub") that Page and Brin began at Stanford in 1996, with the formal company founding — the event most commonly cited as "Google's birthday" — dated to September 4, 1998, when the company was incorporated as a privately held entity. The exact date has been treated somewhat loosely even by Google itself over the years, with the company's own later-adopted "Google Doodle" birthday celebrations shifting to different specific September dates in different years — a small, genuinely documented inconsistency in how even a company's own origin story gets remembered and marked over time, worth knowing precisely because it illustrates that even well-documented modern corporate history can carry its own small ambiguities.
The 1998 France World Cup final itself is worth a bit more specific detail: hosts France defeated Brazil 3–0, with Zinedine Zidane scoring two of the three French goals — a result widely regarded as a landmark moment in French football history and a tournament remembered for a genuinely dominant host-nation performance, distinct from the closer, more contested finals typical of many other World Cup tournaments. It remains, decades later, one of the most frequently referenced tournament wins in French sporting history, still regularly invoked in coverage of subsequent French national team performances, a benchmark victory each later squad's results are still routinely measured against, and a reference point commentators reach for automatically whenever French football's modern history comes up in conversation.