Superstitions and Beliefs
Objectives
Active and passive reporting clausesReading
Many people around the world thought
Saturday, July 7th, 2007, might be the luckiest day of the century. That's
because in the Gregorian Calendar, it was the seventh day of the seventh month
of the seventh year. This might explain why about three times as many weddings
were reported that day in the U.S. as for a typical Saturday in July. On the
other hand, the 13th day of July falls on a Friday — a coincidence many believe
brings bad luck. Why are these numbers so meaningful to some people?
Ian Stewart is a British mathematician and
author at the University of Warwick, who also publishes an Internet web log on
popular mathematics. He recently wrote an article on number symbolism for the
Encyclopedia Britannica online. There is a cultural fascination with numbers,
Stewart says, and people tend to give them all sorts of significance. He notes
that the number 13 is unlucky for many Western cultures, but 4 is unlucky for
the Chinese, because the Chinese word for four and the Chinese word for death
sound very similar. It varies from culture to culture, Stewart says, all of
which suggests that the numbers themselves don't actually have these particular
features.
Surprisingly, the number seven is
consistently considered lucky, even for very different cultures. Everyone
knows that in western casinos, a person wins at
the slot machines if they get three sevens at the same time, and seven is the
most probable outcome of rolling two dice. But even the ancient Greeks thought
seven was a special number. Stewart explains that the Pythagoreans in ancient
Greece thought the number 3 represented the spiritual world. They believed
that the number 4 was connected to the four essential elements in the
physical world: fire, earth, air and water. Therefore, 7— which was 4 plus
3— was particularly important, he says, because it represented both the
spiritual world and the material, or physical, world.
According to Stewart, it is reported
that the Chinese also have a special reverence, or respect, for the number
seven. They believe that many stages of their lives are related to that
number, he explains. People get their baby teeth when they're seven months old,
their adult teeth when they're seven years old, go through puberty when they're
14, which is 2 times 7, women go through menopause when they're 49, which is 7
times 7. Stewart says people find these patterns significant because
they suggest, in one sense, a grand plan. Clearly, he notes, these ages aren't
exact, women don't always go through menopause at 49, but they're very close.
And the number seven keeps coming up.
Stewart notes, too, that the cycle of the
moon is 28 days long, which is 7 times 4. He says that this could be a reason
why, in so many different cultures, weeks are seven days long. For the ancient
Babylonians, he says, seven was an especially important number in astronomy.
They claimed that there were seven heavenly bodies that moved around the
planet, against a background of fixed stars: Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter,
Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. One of the ways we like to order our world,
Stewart observes, is to look at things we see in nature, connect numbers with
them, and then say 'Ah! See? Those numbers are important.'
He thinks there might also be a more
mathematical reason behind our interest in numbers like 7 and 13: both are
prime numbers. He asserts these numbers are surprising because they
can't be built up from smaller numbers by multiplying them together. Every time
you come to a prime number, Stewart explains, you think: this is sort of
different from everything that's come before, it's not related to the numbers I
understand, so perhaps it has all sorts of strange properties.
Maybe there is an explanation for some of
these things, says the author, but it's not that particular numbers are lucky
or unlucky. "It's the way we react to them," Stewart says. "We
tend to invent patterns even when they don't really exist because our brains
like patterns.” As a mathematician, Ian Stewart doesn't believe numbers have
any supernatural powers. But he understands their emotional appeal,
which is probably why days like July 7th, 2007 and Friday, July 13th are
special for many people, and why a faith in the symbolic power of numbers has
been such an enduring part of human culture.
Taken and adapted from: https://www.voanews.com/archive/numbers-culture-and-superstition
