07/07/07: Is This Your Lucky Day?

By Heather Whipps, Special to LiveScience
posted: 26 June 2007 09:07 am ET

Those superstitious types who freaked out last year when the calendar read 06/06/06 will have something to smile about on the 7th day of the 7th month, 2007.

Believing the triple appearance of the number 7 will bring luck, many people are planning important events for this first Saturday in July. Brides and grooms, especially, looking for a little extra dose of marital fortune, are flocking to the altar in droves on 07/07/07, according to wedding watchers.

If they only knew what the Chinese were thinking.

The number seven is considered lucky due to its frequent and favorable appearance in the Bible, say historians.

"As the number of the days of God's first week, of the levels of heaven...of the numbers of angels and trumpets, etc., the number came in the last few centuries BCE to represent divine perfection," said David Frankfurter, professor of religious studies and history at the University of New Hampshire. "Something organized seven-fold meant that it corresponded to God's own arrangement."

Numbers control our fate?

Just as some people wouldn't dare get married on a Friday the 13th or live in a house with the address 666, believing in the positive influence of the number seven is just another technique humans use to have some jurisdiction over the chaotic world around them, said Frankfurter.

“In our modern American society we have a tendency to look for magical ways to control the world or fate, so numerology is especially important for us,� Frankfurter said.

The obsession with numerology—and other para-sciences like astrology—tends to get stronger especially during significant life events like marriages, he added. "It represents Americans' rather weak (compared to Asian cultures') attempt to exert some numerical or calendrical control over important life-cycle, transition, or other crisis situations," Frankfurter told LiveScience.

Seven not lonely in luck

Trying to find meaning in numbers is a practice that goes back to ancient times, say historians, and doesn't begin and end with 6, 7 and 13.

There are many other numbers in the Bible that were thought to have sacred meanings, said Frankfurter, including twelve (for the tribes of Israel and the zodiac), five (books of Moses) and four (archangels, gospels).

Lucky numbers also vary from culture to culture, proving, skeptics say, that coincidental connections between an event and the influence of a number can always be found if you're looking hard enough, no matter what the digit.

Chinese culture, for example, associates "degrees" of luck according to how a number is pronounced. Eight, whose Chinese name rhymes with the words for prosperity and wealth, is considered particularly auspicious. The Beijing Olympics, as a result, will open next year at 8 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2008.

Oh, and many Chinese consider 7 a very unlucky number associated with death. Don’t tell the brides.

In Japan, the number four means death. It seems the square numbers are ugly to the Japanese. The acceptable numbers for bonsai tree groupings are the primes: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. Notice that four and nine, both squares, are missing from the sequence. Also missing from the sequence are the composite numbers 6, 8, and 10.

This is a small branch of mathematics I have not previously encountered.
What are its roots?
(or should I leaf it alone?).

The numerological aspect is present in all societies. Superstition gets hooked to numbers. Standard stuff. The ancient Greeks liked geometric form. They had a category for triangular numbers (that can be represented by an array of objects in a plane that fill a triangular area), and a category for rectangular numbers. Every non-prime number is rectangular.

Take a handful of marbles and put them in a box lid so that they can roll around. Then tilt the lid so one corner is down. All the marbles will roll to the corner. Then take a stick and push the marbles until they form a rectangular array. That's a mechanical computer doing a primality test. If there is no rectangular array (except a 1-by-n), then the number of marbles is prime. Find a way to do it really fast for big numbers and you might become famous.