40 Fun Facts About Numerology

Which host city opened its Summer Olympics at 8 pm on the eighth day of the eighth month for luck?

Beijing began its 2008 opening ceremony at 8 pm on 8 August because the number is considered auspicious and is associated with prosperity in Chinese culture.

In Chinese, Japanese and Korean, the number four is widely avoided because it sounds like the word for what?

Death is such a close match in sound that hospitals in South Korea almost always skip the fourth floor and room number four.

Which former US president had the street number of his new Bel-Air home changed from 666 to 668?

Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy moved to St. Cloud Road in Los Angeles in 1989, just after he left office, and had the address renumbered to dodge the number of the beast.

Which pop star calls 13 her lucky number and has made prominent use of it throughout her career?

Taylor Swift was born on 13 December 1989 and has worked the number into her various works, the opposite of the many people who go out of their way to dodge it.

Which Greek philosopher from Samos founded a mystical school that taught the whole world is built on numbers?

Pythagoras founded his school in the 6th century BC, and one modern system that gives the letters A to Z the values 1 to 9 is still called the Pythagorean method.

In which country is 17 unlucky, a fear often traced to the Roman numeral XVII being an anagram of VIXI?

Italy treats Friday the 17th, not the 13th, as its day of bad luck, and the usual explanation is that the Latin word vixi means "I have lived", a hint that the speaker's days are over.

Which comic actor played a man consumed by the 23 enigma in Joel Schumacher's 2007 thriller The Number 23?

Jim Carrey was so captivated by the idea that he renamed his production company JC23 before he had even read the script.

Which Hogwarts subject, taught by Professor Vector, shares its name with the older word for numerology?

Arithmancy joins the Greek words for number and divination, and at Hogwarts it is a must for anyone hoping to work as a curse-breaker at Gringotts bank.

Which TV drama about plane-crash survivors on an island kept returning to the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42?

Lost had the character Hurley win a fortune by playing the sequence in a lottery, a prize that seemed to bring the people around him nothing but misfortune.

The belief that 13 at a table brings bad luck is often traced to which biblical meal attended by Judas?

The Last Supper put 13 at one table, and from the 1890s English-language writers repeated the idea that Judas, who betrayed Jesus, was the 13th to sit down, though the Bible gives no seating order.

What name do numerology fans give to repeating-digit sequences such as 111 and 444, a term defined by Doreen Virtue?

Angel numbers were later disowned by their own populariser: after converting to Christianity, Doreen Virtue said in 2024 that she regretted ever writing about them.

In modern numerology, what name is given to 11, 22 and 33, which are not reduced to a single digit?

Master numbers earn the title, says numerologist Hans Decoz, not for their matching digits but because those digits are 1, 2 and 3, and 22 is nicknamed the Master Builder.

Which core number in a numerology chart is worked out from a person's full date of birth?

The Life Path number is treated as the most important figure in a chart, and the month, day and year are each reduced separately before the three are added together.

Which book of the New Testament names 666 as the number of the beast in its thirteenth chapter?

Revelation gives the figure in chapter 13, verse 18, although Papyrus 115, a very early manuscript of that passage, records the beast's number as 616.

Scholars widely link the biblical number of the beast to which Roman emperor, a persecutor of Christians?

Nero fits because the name and title Nero Caesar, written in Hebrew letters and totalled by their number values, add up to exactly 666.

Which tongue-twisting word, built from the Greek for thirteen and fear, names the dread of the number 13?

Triskaidekaphobia runs deep enough that hotels, builders and lift makers have avoided the number, so many towers have no floor or room labelled 13.

In Spain and Latin America, the unlucky 13th of the month falls on which weekday instead of Friday?

Tuesday the 13th, or martes trece, is the day of bad luck in Hispanic countries, and Greeks distrust the same weekday as one ruled by Ares, the god of war.

In a modern retelling of Norse myth, which god arrives uninvited as the 13th guest at a dinner party in Valhalla?

Loki, the trickster, then has Balder shot with a mistletoe-tipped arrow, although the Prose Edda's own account never mentions a dinner party or the number 13.

What is the Jewish practice of adding up the number values of Hebrew letters to find hidden meaning in words called?

Gematria has ancient cousins: in the 8th century BC, Sargon II of Assyria claimed to have built a wall whose length in cubits matched the number value of his name.

Jewish money gifts often come in multiples of 18, the value of which Hebrew word that Elvis Presley wore on a necklace?

Chai means "alive", and giving in multiples of 18 is known as giving chai, which is why Jewish charities often suggest donations of 18, 36 or 54 dollars.

Which mystical tradition, built on texts like the Zohar, uses letter-number sums to find hidden meanings in scripture?

Kabbalah went far beyond simple letter totals: its writers used dozens of far more advanced counting methods, many of which never received a name.

In Chinese legend, the Lo Shu magic square, whose rows all total 15, first appeared on the back of which animal?

A turtle is said to have risen from the flooding Luo River, after people made offerings to calm the river god, with the pattern of dots marked on its shell.

In which country is 39 seen as a badge of shame, making cars with it on their plates hard to sell?

Afghanistan's curse of 39 is widely blamed on a pimp from the city of Herat, said to have been nicknamed after the number on his car's plate and his apartment door.

Which single digit always reappears when you keep adding together the digits of any of its multiples?

9 is the one digit with this trick: 13 times it is 117, whose digits sum back to it, and the same rule drives the old error check known as casting out nines.

Which number, sacred in Hinduism and Buddhism, is the usual count of beads on a mala prayer string?

108 beads make up the main body of a standard mala, while shorter strings usually use a factor of the number, such as 54 or 27.

Which quantum physicist, long preoccupied with the number 137, died in a Zurich hospital room with that very number?

Wolfgang Pauli puzzled all his career over why the fine-structure constant is nearly 1/137, and in hospital he asked a visiting assistant whether he had seen the room number.

Which director made his feature debut with Pi, a 1998 thriller about a mathematician chasing a 216-digit number?

Darren Aronofsky shot Pi on high-contrast black-and-white film and helped fund it by asking friends, relatives and acquaintances for donations of 100 dollars each.

Which Beat Generation writer did Robert Anton Wilson credit as the first person to believe in the 23 enigma?

William S. Burroughs dated his fascination to about 1960 in Tangier, where a Captain Clark bragged to him of sailing for 23 years without an accident.

Which composer, who had a fear of the number 13, died shortly before midnight on Friday 13 July 1951?

Arnold Schoenberg had been warned by an astrologer on his 76th birthday that the year ahead was a critical one, because 7 and 6 add up to 13.

Which sacred triangle of ten dots, in rows of one to four, did ancient Greek mystics swear their oaths by?

The tetractys stood for ten, which its devotees revered as a unity of a higher order, and the oath they swore invoked the figure by name.

Which English heavy metal band stirred controversy in the United States with its 1982 album The Number of the Beast?

Iron Maiden drew fire for the title track's lyrics and for cover art showing the band's mascot Eddie controlling Satan like a puppet, and the group has been nicknamed The Beast ever since.

Which medieval epic poem is built around the number three, with three parts and interlocking three-line stanzas?

The Divine Comedy is divided into three cantiche, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, and its verse form, terza rima, chains the lines together in tercets.

Which Silicon Valley computer pioneer held the US phone number 888-8888 for many years?

Steve Wozniak's run of eights would be prized in China, where Sichuan Airlines paid roughly 280,000 US dollars in 2003 for a phone number made up entirely of that digit.

Which 1997 book by Michael Drosnin claimed an ancient text had foretold the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin?

The Bible Code leaned on a 1994 paper about equidistant letter sequences in Genesis, whose three authors all denounced the conclusions Drosnin drew from it.

The Soul Urge number, also called the Heart's Desire, is based on which letters of a person's name?

The vowels are said to reveal a person's tender side, while the consonants are totalled separately for the Personality number, and the letter Y can count as either.

In a numerology chart, the Expression number is found by adding up the letter values of what?

Full birth name is the rule, even if a clerical error crept onto the birth certificate and the family accepted it, while a person's current name gives only a lesser reading.

In South Korean lifts, the fourth-floor button is sometimes marked with which letter instead of the number 4?

F, standing for four, hides a digit many Koreans treat as an ill omen, and flats with numbers such as 404 are avoided so much that their value can suffer.

Chinese speakers use which number online as shorthand for "I love you" because of how it sounds in Mandarin?

520 is pronounced wu er ling, close enough to the Mandarin phrase to stand in for it, and the longer 5201314 stretches the message to cover a whole lifetime.

Which celebrity palm reader, whose clients included Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, also popularised modern numerology?

Cheiro was the stage name of Irish-born William John Warner, who took it from cheiromancy, an old word for palmistry, and devised a system he called fadic numbers.

Which occult writer gave the Latin alphabet number values in his 16th-century Three Books of Occult Philosophy?

Cornelius Agrippa worked with a shorter alphabet than today's, because U, J and W were not commonly considered separate Latin letters at the time.