Everyone can agree that 1+1=2. But the idea that 7 is greater than 13 -- that some numbers are luckier than others -- makes no sense to some people. Such numerical biases can cause deep divisions.
And that is what happened earlier this month in Hong Kong. Property developer Henderson Land Development Co. made news for selling a condominium for $56.6 million, a price the developer called a residential record in Asia. But after that sale was announced, the property began making news for other unusual numbers. Henderson is labeling the floors of its property at 39 Conduit Road with numbers that increase, but not in the conventional 1-then-2 way. The floor above 39, for example, is 60. And the top three floors are consecutively labeled 66, 68 and 88.
This offended some people’s sense of order. At a protest Sunday against high housing prices, Hong Kong Democratic Party legislators expressed dissatisfaction with the numbering scheme’s tenuous relationship to reality. ’You could call the ground floor the 88th floor, but it’s meaningless,’ says Emily Lau. ’When you say you live on the 88th floor, people expect you to be on the 88th floor, not the 10th floor or something.’
Numerology, a belief that certain digits have greater meaning beyond merely their quantity, has long been been viewed as a kind of loony uncle to mathematics. Numerologists favor or fear certain numbers depending on factors such as the sound of the words for those numbers or the letter in the alphabet they correspond to. That kind of reasoning leads some mathematicians, who are governed by numerical laws and properties, to believe they have one up on numerologists.
But many mathematicians have their own emotional attachments to numbers that drove them to enter the field in the first place. Some will cop to having numerical crushes that might not look that different from numerologists’.
’The idea that numbers are somehow pure and immune to superstitious thinking, because they’re somehow more ’objective’ than words, doesn’t take into account the fact that every concept exists (in our minds) in an interconnected tapestry of emotionally and culturally charged signifiers,’ Golan Levin, designer of the interactive project The Secret Lives of Numbers, which tracks the popularity of every whole number between one and one million, writes in an email. He considers most numerical superstitions harmless.
Thomas Garrity, a mathematician at Williams College, has always had a particular fondness for the number 9. The number 51, however, doesn’t make his favorites list.
’This might stem from childhood, when I regularly thought that 51 should be prime, even though 51=3x17,’ he says, taking a trip down mathematical memory lane. But he doesn’t base decisions on his preferences, for instance by avoiding the 51st floor of buildings, he says. ’I can understand people having slightly irrational feelings about particular numbers,’ Prof. Garrity says. ’I don’t get, though, people making real decisions based on such feelings.’
And yet some numerical superstitions do spread, especially when profits are involved. A Las Vegas casino that caters to Hong Kong high rollers also skips floors from 40 to 59, while Henderson’s Hong Kong development omits the 13th floor to cater to Western tastes.
A Henderson spokeswoman says customers ’don’t want the fours and the unlucky numbers. These numbers are more interesting.’
Henderson chose to name the floors as it did because of positive associations with 6 and 8, and negative ones with 4. In Cantonese and Mandarin, the word for eight sounds like ’faat,’ which means prosperity. Hence the Beijing Olympics starting time of 8 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2008. The word for four, meanwhile, ’sounds very much like ’death,’ and is therefore avoided at all costs,’ says Hung-Hsi Wu, professor emeritus of mathematics at University of California, Berkeley, who was born in Hong Kong. Six is also considered lucky.
A preference for six over four also guided developers of the 42-floor Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas. There, penthouses are on the 60th, 61st and 62nd floor because Mandalay Bay skips the numbers 40 to 59.
Gordon Absher, spokesman for Mandalay owner MGM Mirage, says that decision was shaped by possible perceptions of high rollers when they are assigned to those floors. ’You could think that we are trying to, as the casino, give you bad luck,’ Mr. Absher says.
Similarly, developers who would assuage fears of 13 can’t avoid the existence of a 13th floor in buildings with 13 or more stories. But they can rename it out of existence. When a 13th floor was added to the Skirvin Hotel in Oklahoma City, in the 1930s, it was named the 14th floor. The hotel was shuttered in 1988 and reopened and renamed in 2007 by Hilton, which nonetheless kept the name for the top floor.
The 22-story headquarters of Chicago-based Marc Realty avoids throwing off the numbers in higher floors by labeling the 13th floor ’14A.’ It labels the 14th floor ’14B.’
’That arrangement keeps the elevations of the upper floors straight in a physical sense,’ says Marc marketing coordinator Dan Krc. He adds that triskaidekaphobia, or fear of 13, appears to be fading, with floors labeled 13 in Marc properties showing occupancy rates are no lower than other floors.
The negative associations with 13 have been traced to the number of diners at the Last Supper, before the betrayal of Jesus. Some believed it went back to prehistoric times -- the lowest number that couldn’t be counted on ten fingers and two feet. (Apparently, individual toes couldn’t be counted).
But Underwood Dudley, retired professor of mathematics at Depauw University and author of ’Numerology,’ says he wasn’t able to verify any of these. ’As far as I can tell, some number had to be unlucky, and it was 13,’ Dr. Dudley says.
Beverly Kay, a numerologist in Mequon, Wisc., doesn’t buy fears of 13. However, she says her work reading meaning into clients’ birth dates and names is consistent with math. ’This is scientific,’ Ms. Kay says.
Psychologists and historians generally have tied such beliefs to the broader human tendency to seek patterns and systems where none exist. At its extreme, an emotional relationship to a number can creep into obsessive-compulsive behavior. In his book ’Strange Brains and Genius,’ Clifford Pickover dug through case studies of numerical obsessive-compulsive disorder, and found that it could be tied to just about any numeral. Electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla demanded precisely 18 clean towels a day and showed an intense preference for multiples of three.
While mathematicians generally don’t go to Tesla-like extremes, they possess a generally positive outlook about all numbers and that distinguishes them from numerologists, they say.
For example, Kenneth Ribet, a professor of mathematics at Berkeley, considers some prime numbers ’friends,’ he says. One is 144,169, which reads like 12 squared followed by 13 squared; another the easily remembered number of 1,234,567,891.
’Mathematicians don’t have numbers that they’re afraid of or shy away from because we do really like all of the numbers,’ says Prof. Ribet. ’On the other hand, some of us have favorites.’
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