[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]
People like oddness.
Magicians know that most folks, asked to pick a number between one and five, will say three. Most asked to pick a number between one and ten will say seven.
When I was young, my Grandma taught me my first lesson in art composition: objects grouped in threes are more pleasing to the eye than those grouped in twos or fours. I don’t know how she knew that, she wasn’t an artist, but she was right. We are drawn to the balanced asymmetry of odd numbers.
One odd number is “Belphegor’s Prime,” Belphegor being a high-ranking demon in Hell whose cursed number is 1,000,000,000,000,066,600,000,000,000,001. It’s a palindrome—the same forward and back—with 13 zeroes on either side of a 666 in the middle. It’s also a prime number, indivisible by anything but 1 and itself. A similar so-called “beastly palindromic prime” is 700,666,007. Sinister!
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung and physicist Richard Feynman both extolled the prime number 137, which seemed to surface in their work more often than it should, hinting at some inscrutably deep pattern in the universe. Some scientists wouldn’t be surprised if, when the Theory of Everything that unites subatomic quantum mechanics with cosmological relativity is finally discovered, its formula has a “137” in it.
One of my favorite numbers is 51, because it’s 17 x 3 but somehow seems like it shouldn’t be.
Of course, according to writer Douglas Adams, the Ultimate Answer to Everything is 42. How odd that it’s not odd.
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