I came across this most charming article the other day, about a funny new unit of measurement called the “smoot” and named after Oliver R. Smoot Jr. who was in MIT’s class of 1962 who in 1958 lay his body down over and over again across Cambridge, MA’s Longfellow Bridge in order to determine that it measured 364.4 smoots (plus 1 ear). Sixty eight years later, this spring in fact, Smoot’s classmate Martin Klein measured the Longfellow in a new unit… the “klein.” This made me chuckle, but also got me thinking about some of the fun and fabulous math you can do this summer! What can you measure in your own “you”-nits? Can you come up with some “you”-nit conversions? I’d love to see pictures and hear about your measurement adventures!
One klein = 57.5 inches = 146.05 centimeters = 1.4605 meters = .0009075126 miles = 1.597222 yards = 4.791667 feet = .0007886069 nautical miles = .007260087 furlongs = 0.7986111 fathoms = 172.5 barleycorns = 292,100,000 beard seconds = 647.4421 Ligne = 14.375 horse hands = 4.819655 shaku = .85820896 smoots.
“A New Unit of Measurement to Honor an Influential MIT Alumnus.” MIT News, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 12 May 2026, news.mit.edu/2026/new-unit-of-measurement-honors-influential-mit-alumnus-0512.
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