Friday, October 13, 2006
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Unexplained Numbers
Today is Friday the 13th, by all accounts, an unlucky day and number. You never see a 13th floor in any building in the US. Or any room number that ends in 13. Or streets. Or street numbers. Why is 13 so unlucky? I've read that Judas was the thirteenth arrivee to the last supper. I've also heard that the 13th visitor to a coven of witched--12 members--is the devil himself. There are, supposedly, 13 loops in a hangman's noose.
In Japan, the numbers 4 and 9 are inauspicious because their pronunciations mimick the sounds for "death" and "suffering", respectively. This is why you should know that when you give a gift, such as dishes or cups, they can never be in groups of 4s or 9s. This is really difficult in the US because most dishes and cups that you might buy for a wedding gift come in sets of 4s. Not that I'm superstitious, but I will usually make my own set of 5s, as they do in Japan. But even though there is a reason for these inauspicious numbers, every building has a 4th and 9th floor, unlike the unexplained absence of a 13th floor over here.
Now, I've never been good at math and so my distaste for numbers is rather healthy. I mean, I'm truly a simple guy. I have five fingers on each hand and I have two hand which gives me ten fingers. I have two feet with ten toes. If everything were divisible by 2s and 5s, life would be so simple, no?
But noooooooo... our lives are crowded with numbers that are unexplained, or for me, inexplicable. Like, why do we have so many 12s? There are 12 hours in a day which I simply cannot fathom. 12 months in a year I can grasp as there are 12 moon cycles per year, three per season. This, naturally, leads to 7 days in a week--unless you're a Beatle--which was inevitable because there are 28 days in 1 moon cycle, although I'm not sure why they HAD to divide the 28 into 4 groups of 7s. But why 12 hours in a day? I mean, what is it in our time-space continuum that requires 1 revolution of the earth be divded into 12/24 units? What's wrong with 10s and 20s? And let's not forget a baker's dozen. Was this a marketing ploy? Buy 10 get 2 free?
Other numbers I don't get
- 32 degrees = freezing. Why not 0 as in centigrade? Besides being Sandy Koufax's number, I see no merit in this number
- 21 years of age to drink. Huh? What is so magical about 21? Except that it's divisible by 7.
- 18 years of age to vote or smoke cigarettes. Y'know, in Japan you have to be an adult to either smoke or drink or vote. So the age is the same for all these acts requiring responsibility--20. What a nice round number.
- 11 players per side in a football game? Why 11? Why 6 points per touchdown plus 1 extra point, as well as 3 points for a field goal.
- For that matter, why 9 players per side in a baseball game. And why 9 innings, 3 outs, 3 strikes but 4 balls? (This is a setup for an inappropriate remark from which I will refrain.)
Oh well, I could go on for ever but I won't bore you.
So what numbers bug you? Are there unlucky numbers in other cultures?
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Comments (16)
in China, the number 4 is also superstitious
i always thought a baker's dozen was 13?
-ray leeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
4 is bad luck in china as well as korea... i think.
all the numbers on your page make me dizzy, because i never thought about it before. :) 21, 18. 20, 9, 8, 4, ...... it's starting to remind me of "LOST". :D
The Babylonians (yeah, I mean the c.3000BC ones) were some of the first mathemeticians, and, from an ancient engineering standpoint, having numbers that were neatly divisible by several other numbers was extremely convenient. How does that translate now? Well, note that a lot of the funny numbers you see in time and some measurements have a lot of divisors:
- 60 (minutes in an hour, seconds in a minute) has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, & 60
- 24 (hours in a day) has 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, & 24
- 360 (degrees in a circle) has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180, & 360 (phew!)
So you can think, if you were designing some monument that was circular, it'd be good if your measurement of that circle topped off at a number with a lot of divisors, so you wouldn't have to start breaking out fractions and nonrepeating decimals. It started with ancient civilizations, and carried over into the modern day (sort of how a lot of railroad tracks in Europe are the same distance apart as the width of a Roman chariot).
As for the other numbers, no clue. I prefer metric anyhow. KF
for the tweleve thing....perhaps people had 6 fingers on each hand back then.
j/k.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal
The Babylonians used a mixed-system that had alternating base 10s and base 60s for the numbers. Hence a lot of the 60-related numbers you see (60/5 = 12, so it relates to 12 and 24 as well).
Plus your last open question... 47 and 147 are my favorite numbers, and 8 and 88 are aesthetic and represent 'completeness' to me (I think 8/88 is significant for Arab and Chinese culture, too). For 'unlucky' numbers, I don't like 13 and 39 (= 13*3), but I never got why. KF
4 is also unlucky in Korean culture for the exact same reason that it's unlucky in China and Japan.
As for other numbers I remember... dunno. There's always the classic "Devil's Number" of 666. 'bout it though.
As for the 18 being adult, I think that's pretty arbitrary; however, 21 for alcohol -- 21 is when men and women are supposed to be physically (and hopefully) mentally developed; as a plus, it's also older than 18, so people have driven for a while before they can drink (in theory).
With Fahrenheit... I've heard two things; firstly, that he arbitrarily called "0" the coldest temperature he could measure and went from there, which made the temperature of water freezing slightly higher than that; secondly, that he was a Freemason and 32 was a somewhat auspicious number (much like 42 for geeks, I suppose).
I don't know if you heard, but this last Friday the 13th was pretty special; it's the first Friday the 13th in 476 years to have all the numerals of its date add up to 13. The last was Jan. 13, 1520 (1/13/1520).
They're not really lucky numbers, but they're somewhat mystical to a lot of people: pi and the golden ratio.
The twenty one for drinking rule comes from an old European assumption that your body completely renewed itself every seven years - seven was an important number, hence the Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Wonders of the World, etc., etc - so adulthood was defined as when your body had renewed itself three times - ie at your 321st birthday. In the UK it used to be that you couldn't vote till you were twenty one (I think it went down to 18 around 1971), though I don't know of a period when drinking in this country was limited to 21 plus year olds (it's currently eighteen over here).
In Norse mythology, or at least the version we have, there was a feast involving the the Aesir (a tribe of Gods, the Norse like the Greeks believed divinities came in several sorts), The last (and thirteenth!) attendee was Loki (God of Fire, but not an Aesir) and for some reason (I haven't read the story for several decades and can't remember the details) one of the others provoked Loki into deciding to kill the God Baldur. This, ultimately leads to Ragnorak, the end of the Aesir and of life as we know it. As I say, this was recorded after Christianity had displaced the Norse religion, and there is some evidence of corruption of our sorces of information. But the implications are clear.
By the way, in the UK we think 13 is unlucky, but we don't go overboard about it. We still have 13th floors, a 13yth row in aircraft, etc. With the one exception of British Airways' Concordes, which had no row 13 out of defernce to American ... how shall I put this ... preferences in such matters.
Also, interestingly, enough the Mayan calendar used thirteens, though its unclear to me whether they thought the number lucky or unlucky per se. As did a number of other pre-Columbian Meso-american cultures.
And yes, a Baker's Dozen was 13.
Twelve is a common base for counting. Indeed, the word hundred used to mean a dozen tens, and you may see references to "long hundreds" in books of or about viking sagas, as many of the sagas were written when Old Norse (the language) euivalent still meant 120. And of course there is the number word dozen. I've seen it claimed that people counted on the gaps between and either side of their fingers, ie 1 for a closed fist, one finger for two (two sides of the finger), two fingers for three (the outside edges of the two fingers, plus the gap between them) and so on. Given the ignorance of, plus a lack of need for, zero, it makes a sort-of sense, though I don't know the authority for the idea.
Another common number base used both by the Meso-americans and Europeans was 20, hence our word score. Which sort-of implies counting fingers and toes more conventionally than the counting gaps idea I mentioned above.
By the way, the curious number is forty two. Spme may recognise it from Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy, but it also appears in Lewis Carrol's Hunting of the Snark (see gardiner's Annoted Snark for a fully explained text). Lewis Carrol apparently claimed to be 42 for several years! Why? No-one knows!
4 seems to be in a reocurring theme in my life. . . like clockwork... well almost.... I wake up to 4:44 am and every time I look at my watch.... guess what? yes there's bound to be a 4 some where...
Am I unluck or is "4" just been given a bad rep??