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MartinGardner
.
Magic
The
Numbers
The
Mag~c
Numbers
MartinGardner
Prometheus
Books
Buffalo, New York
Published 1985by
Prometheus Books
700 E. Amherst Street, Buffalo, New York 14215
Copyright @ 1985 by Martin Gardner
Material previously published in Scientific American,
copyright @ 1960,1961,1963,1964,1965,1966,1967,
1968,1969,1971,1972,1973,1974,1975,1976,
1977, 1978, 1980 Scientific American.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any system now known or to be invented,
without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a
reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages for inclusion in a
magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Portions of this book appeared as
The Numerology o f Dr. Matrix and
The Incredible Dr. Matrix
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 84-43183
ISBN 0-87975-281-5 cloth
ISBN 0-87975-282-3 paper
For Tom,
my number two son
Contents
Introduction
1. New York
2. Los Angeles
3. Sing Sing
4. Lincoln and Kennedy
5. Chicago
6. Miami Beach
7. Philadelphia
8. Pi
9. Wordsmith College
10. Squaresville
11. Left \'ersus Right
12. Fifth Avenue
13. The Moon
14. Honolulu
15. Houston
16. Clairvoyance Test
17. Pyramid Lake
18. The King James Bible
19. Calcutta
20. Stanford
21. Chautauqua
22. Istanbul
Answers and Commentary
Introduction
My
Bourbaki he acquired even deeper insights into this fundamental branch of mathematics.
I would have liked to include in this book a photograph of
Dr. Matrix and Iva, but alas, they would never allow me to take
a picture of either of them. As for Iva, I have not heard from her
since her father was killed. Perhaps she will read these words and
get in touch with me.
Hendersonville, N.C.
1. New York
NEW YORK
10
NEW YORK
11
* The
12
more and you get 1913, the last year of peace before World
War I destroyed his empire. Unusual date patterns are
common in the lives of all famous men. Is it coincidence
that Raphael, the great painter of sacred scenes, was born
on April 6 and died on April 6, and that both dates fell on
Good Friday? Is it a coincidence that Shakespeare was
born on April 23 and died on April 23, and that twice 23 is
46, the number I mentioned before as the key to his work
on the Bible?"
"And 23 is the number of the best-known Psalm," I
added, "which presumably Shakespeare translated."
The doctor nodded and continued. "Exactly one
hundred years ago three famous philosophers were born:
John Dewey, Henri Bergson, and Samuel Alexander. For
all three, evolution was the cornerstone of their philosophical visions. Why? Because 1859 was the year that
Darwin's Origin of Species was published. Do you think it
accidental that Houdini, the lover of mystery, died on Oc
tober 31, the date of Halloween?"
"Could be," I murmured.
The doctor shook his head vigorously. "I suppose you'll
think it coincidental that in the library's Dewey decimal
system the classification for books on number theory is
512.81."
"Is there something unusual about that?"
"The number 512 is 2 to the ninth power and 81 is 9 to
the second power.* But here's something even more remarkable. First, 11 plus 2 minus 1 is 12. Let me show you
how this works out with letters." He moved to the blackboard and chalked on it the word ELEVEN. He added TWO
to make ELEVENTWO,
then he erased the letters of ONE,
* This had been pointed out by Harry Lindgren in the Australian Mathematics Teacher 8 (1952):8.
NEW YORK
13
v-
I
1
C100
ARI 1
US
14
number is quite old.* Of' course it's easy for a skillful numerologist to find 666 in any name. In fact, if you add the
Latin numerals in the name ELLEN GOULD WHITE, the
inspired prophetess who founded Seventh-Day Adventism-ounting
w as a 'double u7 or two ups-it also
adds up to 666."
NEW YORK
15
When the prime minister of England was William Gladstone, a political enemy wrote GLADSTONE in Greek,
added up the Greek numerals in the name, and got 666.
HITLER adds up neatly to the number if we use a familiar
code in which a is 100, b, is 101, c is 102, and so on."
I'
16
NEW YORK
17
William Tafi
Woodrow Wilson
Warren Harding
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover
Franklin Roosevelt
Harry Truman
Dwight Eisenhower
"Ike doesn't have a double letter," I said.
"Eisenhower is the one exception so far. We must remember, however, that he ran twice against Adlai Ewing
Stevenson, who also lacks the double letter. Two things
tipped the scales in Ike's favor: his double initials, D.D.,
and the fact that w is simply an abbreviation for 'double u.'
1 glanced toward the blackboard. "Any other uses for
that circular alphabet?"
"It has many uses," he replied. "Let me give you a recent example. The other day a young man from Brooklyn
came to see me. He had renounced a vow of allegiance to
a gang of hoodlums and he thought he ought to leave town
to avoid punishment by gang members. Could I tell him
by numerology, he wanted to know, where he should go? I
convinced him he should go nowhere by taking the word
ABJURE-it means one who renounces-and substituting
for each letter the letter directly opposite it on the alphabet circle."
Dr. Matrix drew chalk lines on the blackboard fiom A to
N, B to 0, and so on. The new word was NOWHERE. "If
you think that's a coincidence," he said, "just try it with
even shorter words. The odds against starting with a
seven-letter word and finding a second one by this technique are astronomical."
"
18
NEW YORK
19
2. Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES
21
22
* Triskaidekaphobia:
LOS ANGELES
23
24
A B C D E F G H I J
K L A A N O P Q R S T
U V W X Y Z
Figure 3. An old Celtic key for analyzing the names of Kennedy
and Nixon
there have been nine other presidents in this century with
double letters; in every case the letter is I, o, or r. If we
include the only exception, Dwight, Eisenhower, on the
basis of the 'double u' in w , then the set of doubled letters
is 1, o, r, and u. Note that these letters form an arithmetic
progression in the alphabet. Each is three letters ahead of
the one before it. Kennedy's double n is not part of that
progression. Perhaps this will provide his escape fiom another, rather ominous law."
"I know what you are referring to,'' I said. "Since 1840,
a year with digits that add to the unlucky 13, every president elected in a year ending in 0 has died in office."
(Harrison was elected in 1840. He died one month later.
There was, of course, no election in 1850. Lincoln, elected
in 1860, was assassinated. Garfield, elected in 1880, and
McKinley, elected in 1900, were also assassinated. Harding-1920-and
Roosevelt-1940-both
died in office.
The only presidents elected before 1840 in years ending
LOS ANGELES
25
with 0 were Jefferson in 1800 and Monroe in 1820. Neither man died in office, but both died on Independence
Day.)
"Precisely," said Dr. Matrix. "It is closely related to another curious rule, which says that in every election year
ending in 0 the elected president has either two or three
syllables in his last name."
"I've heard about that also," I said. "There was an article about it last year in the New York Times Magazine."'
The article was "Sibylline Syllables," by Jack Doherty
(Feb. 22, 1959).
Dr. Matrix nodded. "From 1800 through 1860 the pattern of syllables was 3,2,3,2. (In 1800, Jefferson; in 1820,
Monroe; in 1840, Harrison; in 1860, Lincoln.) Then the
pattern seemed to reverse itself and became 2, 3,2,3. (In
1880, Garfield; in 1900, McKinley; in 1920, Harding; in
1940, Roosevelt.) It looks as if 1960 marks a switch back to
the original pattern of 3, 2, 3, 2. That would favor the
three-syllabled Kennedy over two-syllabled Nixon and
eliminate completely the four-syllabled Rockefeller."
"And Kennedy did win."
"Yes," said Dr. Martrix, "but the preceding pattern of
three syllables is a bit forced. FDR always pronounced his
name with two syllables-dose-velt."
After jotting all this down, I said, "Do you have any explanation of Rockefeller's famous slip of the tongue at the
Republican convention, where he introduced Nixon as
Richard E. Nixon?"
"Yes, indeed. Slips of the tongue are seldom accidental.
Freud was right in attributing them to unconscious hopes
and fears, but he underestimated the important role also
played by numerical and verbal structure."
"Are you referring to the fact that Thomas Dewey's middle initial is E.2"
26
LOS ANGELES
28
* This is dramatically evident during a total eclipse of the sun when the
moon's disk precisely occludes the sun's disk. Put another way, the tip
of the moon's shadow just brushes the earth's surface. The improbability of this coincidence is a cornerstone in a proof of the existence of
God, as outlined in a ten-page pamphlet by Norman Bloom, published
in 1970 in Guttenberg, New Jersey. The pamphlet is entitled The New
World: The First Proof in History That the Earth, Moon and Sun Are
Controlled by a Thinking, Acting Mind and Hand That Has the Power
of Life and Death over Every Living Thing on Earth. Mr. Bloom reports that he has defended his argument at such centers of higher
learning as Haward, MIT, and Barry Farber's WOR radio show. He
offers $1,000 to anyone who can find a flaw in his proof.
LOS ANGELES
29
"You might ask your readers to see if they can find the
fourth example, with five terms on the left, four on the
right, and perhaps give a simple formula for finding all the
higher examples." (See Answers, Two, 11.)
Dr. Matrix was silent until I finished writing this down,
then he asked, "Are you familiar with Arthur Stanley Eddington's work on the so-called fine-structure constant?" *
"Vaguely. The number is 137, isn't it? As I recall, Eddington had a clever way of deducing it, apart from experimental observation. Didn't he first arrive at 1367"
Dr. Matrix nodded. "He gave a complicated mathematical explanation of why he revised it to 137, but the truth is
that Stanley was one of my most distinguished pupils. We
worked it out one day over a bottle of Greek wine. We
took Eddington's birth year, 1882, multiplied the digits to
obtain 128, then added 9, the number of letters in Eddington's name."
"I can believe it," I said, chuckling. "Tell me, do you
have any interesting numerological puzzles that my
readers might enjoy?"
Dr. Matrix scratched his large nose. "Yes, I had an unusual problem called to my attention recently by my friend
Dennis Sciama, a cosmologist at Cornell University. S u p
pose we wish to form a chain of symbols, using only the
digits 1 and 2. How long a chain can we write without
repeating a pattern, side by side? For example, we can't
write 11or 22, because each repeats the pattern of a single
* For an amusing account of numerological speculations about the
stillunexplained fine-structure constant, including Eddington's "brave attempt" to derive it from a square matrix with a side of sixteen cells, see
George Gamow, Biography of Physics (New York: Harper Torchbook,
19641, pp. 324-329. Dr. Matrix called my attention to the curious palindromic symmetry of the six digits that keep repeating between double
zeros in .007299270072992700
, the decimal for lIls7. For biblical
references to 137, see chapter 18.
...
30
..
3. Sing Sing
32
...
34
ment took a dim view of his work and it was not long until
he found himself firmly confined within the matrix of cells
at Sing Sing. Sentence: five years. Miss Toshiyori took an
apartment in nearby Ossining. She was allowed to visit Dr.
Matrix twice a week, and with his assistance she was managing to carry on his numerological practice by mail.
"Yes," she said on the phone, "I'm sure I can arrange for
you to see him. I'll call you back in a few days and let you
know when."
It was a sunny winter afternoon-not a cloud was in
sight-when I drove to Ossining and wound my way down
the sloping side streets to the bank of the Tappan Zee.
Behind the grim gray walls of Sing Sing the blue waters of
the Hudson rippled pollutedly in the sunlight.
Miss Toshiyori was waiting in one of the visitor's rooms,
been a federal offense (although Dr. Matrix, unaccountably, was confined to a state prison) and those who are foolish enough to try it are
easily and quickly caught.
The Des Moines Register (Aug. 20, 1963) reported that an eighteenyear-old Davenport youth, who had read my interview with Dr. Matrix
in the January 1963 issue of Scientific American, had stupidly attempted to try this method of making money to get cash for entering
college. After one of his phony twentydollar bills was spotted by a
drugstore cashier in Davenport, police had little trouble tracing it to its
source and making the arrest.
The Boston Herald (Feb. 28, 1963) and the Harvard Crimson
(March 2) warned local merchants that fake tens and twenties made by
this method were appearing in the Cambridge area. The Chicago
Daily News (Nov. 29,1968) reported that Reuben Silver of London had
been given an eight-year prison term for cutting up five-pound notes to
make twelve bills from eleven. "The court said the system was so good
that details can't be made public." In the U.S., the method violates
chapter 25, title 18 of U.S. Code section 484.
For a discussion of the many mind-bending geometrical paradoxes
that operate on the same principle as this counterfeiting method, see
chapters 7 and 8 of my Mathematics, Magic and ,Mystery (New York:
Dover. 1956), and my Scientific American columh on advertising premiums (Nov. 1971). The best and funniest printed puzzle of this type,
the Vanishing Leprechuun, is obtainable from W. A. Elliott Co., 212
Adelaide W., Toronto, Canada M5H 1W7.
SING SING
35
as enigmatic and beautiful as ever. She seemed unembarrassed by the context of our meeting. Through a grille beside her chair I recognized the hawklike nose and glittering green eyes of her employer.
Dr. Matrix was in a tired, unsmiling mood, but his voice
was cordial. "I'm afraid 1963 is a hopelessly dull number,"
he said. "Its reversal, 3691, is a prime, but so is the reversal for 1964. Too bad we didn't get together last January. I
could have told you that 987 plus 654 plus 321 is exactly
1962."
"What an astounding coincidencel" I exclaimed. "The
nine digits are in descending orderl" *
Dr. Matrix shook his head. "Such things are never coincidental. They are part of that mysterious order in which
both mathematics and history lie embedded. Last year was
the year of the big countdown. Never before in history
have so many giant rockets been fired to the accompaniment of so many backward-recited integers."
He waited until I had jotted down his remarks in my
notebook. "Have you ever noticed that 12 is equal to 3
times 4, and 56 is equal to 7 times 87"
I thought this over for a moment and gave a start when I
realized that Dr. Matrix's remark contained the first eight
digits in ascending order.+
"My number as a prisoner is rather interesting," he went
on. "It is 54748, a number of five digits. If you add
* This had been discovered by Charles Trigg and published in Recreational Mathematics Magazine (Apr. 1962, p. 33).
t This curiosity was contributed by Everett W. Comstock to Recreational
Mathematics Magazine (Apr. 1962, p. 36). There is no other set of four
consecutive numbers such that the first two, in ascending order, form
an integer equal to the product of the second two. If only each pair of
numbers need be consecutive, many equations can be written, such as
6,162 = 78 x 79. For equalities of this type, see J. A. Lindon's note in
the same magazine (Oct. 1962, p. 35).
36
the fifth powers of each digit [55+ 45+ 75+ 45+ 8=1,
the sum is 54,748. I consider this a favorable omen."
"Are there many numbers like that?"
"Very few. The smallest is 153. It has three digits, so in
this case we raise each digit to its third power. Sum the
powers and you have 153 again. It is no accident that we
are told in the last chapter of the Gospel of St. John, verse
11, that the net Simon Peter drew from the Sea of Tiberias
contained 153 fish. The number has many mystical properties." (I later learned that only three other numbers are
equal to the sum of the cubes of their digits. Each is a
three-digit number. Can the reader discover them? See
Answers, Three, 11.)
"I seem to recall," I said, "that St. Augustine somewhere gives an elaborate numerological analysis of why
those fish numbered 153."
"Yes, St. Augustine starts with 10, the n m b e r of the
commandments and a symbol of the old Mosaic dispensation. To it he adds 7, the number of the gifts of the spirit
and a symbol of the new dispensation. The resulting number, 17, signifies the union of old and new. He then sums
the integers from 1through 17 to obtain 153. Rather primitive numerology, in my opinion, but of course St. Augustine did not have the benefit of today's numerological
techniques." *
SING SING
37
38
SING SING
39
40
42
letter. I did not release this letter to the press, but I made
the mistake of sending a few copies to friends. By the
spring of 1964, portions of the letter, in mimeographed or
photocopied form, were making the rounds of offices in
Manhattan, Washington, and elsewhere. They were published in Newsweek (Aug. 10) and Time (Aug. 21). As the
statements were copied they were frequently garbled or
misquoted. Here for the first time is the complete text of
Dr. Matrix's original letter, exactly as I received it:
DEARMARTINGARDNER:
The two most dramatic and tragic deaths in American
political history were the deaths of Abraham Lincoln
and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. There are so many astonishing numerological parallels involving these two
events of infamy that I am impelled to record them for
you. Please use the following analysis as you wish, but
with discretion.
1. Lincoln was elected president in 1860. Exactly one
hundred years later, in 1960, Kennedy was elected president.
2. Both men were deeply involved in civil rights for
Negroes.
3. Both men were assassinated on a Friday, in the
presence of their wives.
4. Each wife had lost a son while living at the White
House.
5. Both men were killed by a bullet that entered the
head from behind.
6. Lincoln was killed in Ford's Theater. Kennedy met
his death while riding in a Lincoln convertible made by
Ford Motor Company.
7. Both men were succeeded by vice-presidents
named Johnson who were southern Democrats and
former senators.
8. Andrew Johnson was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908, exactly one hundred years later.
43
44
..
45
5. Chicago
CHICAGO
47
48
It was a brilliant performance. Shrewd guesses and predictions were cleverly interwoven with anagrams and
other word plays on the patrons' names or initials, with
curious numerological speculations involving birth dates,
and with a masterful display of what is known in the trade
as "cold reading." (A cold reading is a reading given without prior information about a subject. "Mrs. C.G.," Dr. Matrix would say, "the vibrations of your handwriting suggest
that you recently had a phone call that was most disturbing." Mrs. C.G. would scream with astonished confirmation.) He received a good hand when he finished.
The lights went on. I saw Iva-she had slipped into a
dress-approaching the bar. "Hi!" she said. "I thought I
recognized you during the act. Come along. We have two
hours until the next show."
I slapped some change on the bar. "Old friend," I explained to the bug-eyed man on my lee.
The three of us took a taxi to Dr. Matrix's rooms, now at
the more expensive Allerton Hotel. He was surprisingly
cordial. "Yes," he said, "I chose that order3 square because it contained 1964 so svmmetrically. It is the simplest
magic multiplication square. The product of the three
numbers in any row-horizontal, vertical, or diagonal-is
216. It is the lowest possible product for such a square, assuming, of course, that each cell contains a different positive integer."
He paused until I had finished jotting down this information. "There is a pretty puzzle connected with this
square. You might ask your readers to see if they can rearrange the same nine numbers to make a magic division
square."
When I looked puzzled, he explained: The two end
numbers of any line of three are multiplied, then the product is divided by the middle number. The final result must
always be the same. (See Answers, Five, I.)
49
CHICAGO
. . ."
...
...
50
(except for 19) are readily obtained. By allowing the factorial sign and the dot used as both a decimal point and a
repeating decimal Sign, one can go on to 112. There seems
to be no way to express 113 within these restrictions
unless one employs highly bizarre combinations of the
above symbols, such as the combined square root, decimal, and repeated decimal signs in the denominator of the
first term in the following equation:
The pastime was first mentioned in the issue for December 30-in the palin,dromic, invertible year 1881--of a
lively London weekly that had been founded that year by
the astronomer Richard Anthony Proctor. He called his periodical Knowledge: An Zllustrated Magazine of Science,
Plainly Worded--Exactly Described. A letter to the editor
expressed astonishment at the fact (shown to the writer by
a friend) that all integers from 1 through 20, except 19,
could be expressed by four 4's and simple signs. Factorials
and dots were not allowed. Readers were asked to try their
hand at it before solutions were given in a later (Jan. 13)
issue. (With the help of the factorial sign, 19 can be expressed: 41- 4 - 414. Can the reader of this book find a way
to do it by using only the four arithmetical signs and the
decimal point? See Answers, Five, 11.)
Since 1881 the game has enjoyed occasional revivals. A
lengthy article on the topic, by W. W. Rouse Ball, a p
peared in the Mathematical Gazette for May 1912, and
there have been scores of subsequent articles, including
tables that go above 2,000. Even now the mania will suddenly seize the employees of an office or laboratory, sometimes causing a work stoppage that lasts for days.
"Is it possible," I asked Dr. Matrix, "to express 1964
with four 4's and the traditional symbols?"
52
He shook his head vigorously. "Of course, many important dates are possible. 1776 is 4 times 444. But 1964 is not
one of them. With five 4's, yes." He jotted on my note pad:
"But four 4's, no."
"How about 64?'
"That," said Dr. Matrix, "is not difficult. Oddly enough,
64 can also be expressed-under traditional restrictions, of
course-with three 4's and also with two."
The reader is invited to try his skill on all three problems; that is, to express 64 with four 4's, with three 4's,
and with two 4's. No symbols may be used other than
those that have been mentioned. The task is middling hard
with four 4's, ridiculously easy with three, extremely difficult with two. (See Answers, Five, 111.)
Dr. Matrix gazed vacantly off into space when I spoke to
him about the coming election campaign. In an interview
that I reported in chapter 2 we had spoken about the grim
numerological pattern of death in office for every president who had been elected in a year ending in 0, beginning with Harrison's death in 1841. Now Kennedy, who
had been elected in 1960, had been killed by an assassin.
"Yes," he said finally, "the names and birth dates of the
leading candidates deserve careful analysis. In the past
twenty-two elections, beginning in 1876, the only occasion
on which the man with the shorter last name won a majority of the popular vote was in 1908, when Taft defeated
Bryan. This gives Rockefeller an edge over all his competitors. Of course Nixon, Romney, and Johnson are eliminated because their names lack a double letter such as the
two 1's in Rockefeller."
I was scribbling furiously. "That makes Rocky a stronger
candidate than Goldwater, I suppose. Both men have the
double letter, but Rocky's last name is longer."
CHICAGO
53
"In that respect, yes. Rocky's height, of course, is a liability. In the past fifteen elections, beginning in 1904, the
only time the shorter candidate won the popular vote was
in 1940, when Roosevelt, at six feet two inches, defeated
Willkie, six feet two and a half. By the way, did you know
that both Rockefeller and Romney, the two R.-initial men,
were born on July 87"
I shook my head.
"In fact, all five leading Republican candidatesRockefeller, Romney, Goldwater, Nixon, and Scrantonwere born in months that begin with J . Goldwater and
Nixon were born in January, Scranton in July. Now, j is
the tenth letter of the alphabet. Note that REPUBLICANhas
ten letters and that the digits of '64 sum to 10."
"Is that a good omen?"
"To a certain degree. The digits of 1964, however, sum
to 20. The only candidate with exactly 20 letters in his full
name is Barry Morris Goldwater. On the other hand, the
president will not be inaugurated until 1965, which sums
to 21, the number of letters in the name of William Warren
Scranton."
Your numerology is confusing," I said.
"No more than politics. I regret to report that Scranton,
the governor of Pennsylvania, was not born in Scranton,
Pennsylvania, or in its anagrammatic cousin, Cranston,
Rhode Island. He was born in Madison, Connecticut. But
MADISONis a presidential name, so that should be counted
a favorable sign."
"Someone has suggested," I remarked, "that Rockefeller
should open a campaign speech by saying: 'I come to
Barry Goldwater, not to praise him.'
Dr. Matrix looked as solemn as an owl. "It is possible to
devise many appropriate puns on the candidates' names.
Nix on Nixon, for example. Aldrich Rockefeller sounds
like 'old rich rocky feller,' and one might say that his
66
"
54
6. Miami Beach
D r . Matrix's appearance at the Purple Hat Club, in Chicago, was so sensationally successful that he obtained a
six-week booking at one of the plushier Las Vegas hotels.
According to several well-authenticated reports, the old
swindler not only got a top price for his act but also managed to win $70,000 at the blackjack tables by playing his
own modification of the system explained by mathematician Edward 0.Thorp in his eye-opening book Beat the
Dealer. It is said that Miss Toshiyori helped her father by
making surreptitious calculations on a small transistorized
computer concealed in her handbag.
I wrote to Dr. Matrix in September 1964, while he was
still in Vegas, asking for his opinions on the coming presidential contest between Goldwater and Johnson. I reminded him that only Barry Goldwater had the valuable
double letter in his name. Did this mean he would win?
No, Matrix replied. The double letter was balanced by
another important rule. Voters tend to prefer names ending in on over names ending in er. Tyler, Hoover, and
Eisenhower were the only "'er" presidents, as compared
with nine "on" presidents: Washington, Jefferson. Madison, Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Andrew Johnson,
Benjamin Harrison, Wilson, and Lyndon Johnson. To be
56
MIAMI BEACH
57
58
MIAMI BEACH
59
60
MIAMI BEACH
61
Dr. Matrix nodded. "Someday I intend to write a commentary on Joyce's number symbolism. But back to pi. I
wish I had time to go into the subtler properties and the
historical significance of those first 32 decimals. Let me
say, though, that '62-'64 in the center of that series between the bars indicates the three eventful years that have
just passed as the world moves from '33 on the right, the
year Hitler became chancellor, to George Orwell's '84 on
the left. Correctly interpreted, you know, pi conveys the
entire history of the human race."
"Do you have," I asked, shifting the topic purposely,
"any left-right reversal items that might provide puzzlesT"
"Thousands," sighed Dr. Matrix. "Consider for a moment the digits from 1 to 9. Arrange them in descending
order, reverse and subtract (see Figure 9). The result is
quite unexpected. The same nine digits reappear in the
answer."
"I've seen that before," I said, "in medieval books on
numerology."
"Of course," replied Dr. Matrix. "I bring it up because
62
MIAMI BEACH
63
able. After I told him he closed his eyes for a minute, then
opened them suddenly and said: "A most unusual number.
It's the only three-digit number with the following property: multiply it by a certain digit and the result is a threedigit number that is the reverse of what you get if you add
that same digit to it instead." (See Answers, Six, 11.)
"I'm writing all this up for January," I said. "I'll include
that and give the answer in February. Any puzzles involving the number of the new year?"
"I assumed you'd ask me that," Dr. Matrix answered
with one of his rare, crooked smiles. "You recall that in
your column for October 1962 you asked readers to insert
plus or minus signs wherever they pleased inside the
series 123456789 and in the reverse series 987654321 so
that in each case the series totaled loo?"
I nodded. "And in the 'Letters' department for January
1963 we printed computer results giving eleven different
solutions for the ascending series, fifteen for the descending." (See Figure 10.)
"To complete the record," Dr. Matrix said, "if a minus
sign is allowed in front of the first digit, there are three
more answers for the descending series and one unique
answer for the ascending."
987,654,321, then divide the resulting 987,654,312 by 8, the result is
exactly 123,456,789.
Two readers, Fitch Cheney and Alan B. Lees, independently called
attention to the following equalities:
729 = g3x 91
66,339 = g3x 91%
6,036,849 = g3x 912
This suggested to both men the following conjecture:
which they easily verified by using the standard formula for sums of
geometric progressions.
MIAMI BEACH
65
MIAMI BEACH
87
7. Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA
69
* Fliess was a Berlin nose doctor who became obsessed by the numbers
23 and 28; they were the basis for a theory of cycles that he applied to
everything from the nose to the solar system. For about a decade he
and Freud were involved in a strange neurotic friendship. I have given
an account of Fliess's numerology, and its modifications by contemporary followers, in chapter 12 of my Mathematical Carnival (NewYork:
Knopf, 1975).
70
* It
PHILADELPHIA
71
72
* For comments on this remark by readers of my Scientific American column, see Answers, Seven, closing section.
PHILADELPHIA
73
in my notebook. "The first name of the woman who produced that arrangement of the ten digits is Betty. As another clue, you can add that she suffers from a compulsion
to put things in order, a compulsion that has found an
outlet in her job as indexer for a large textbook publisher
in Manhattan." (See Answers, Seven, 111.)
Any number that comes to one in a dream, Dr. Matrix
emphasized, is of special significance in psychonumeranalysis, but the analyst must be ingenious and flexible if
he is to interpret the number correctly. Dr. Matrix had a
low opinion of Freud's dream-number explanations in his
book on dreams, and he thought the later attempts recorded by Jung, Adler, Stekel, and Jones were equally
humdrum.
"I had a Pentecostal minister in to see me recently," he
said, "who repeatedly dreamed of 7,734. When I asked
him to write that number and then turn it upside down, he
confessed at once that he had been suffering for years from
a fear that his religious doubts would deprive him of his
place among the saved. His dream censor was, of course,
concealing HELL, the feared word, by inverting it. A similar case concerned a Boston financier who told me about
his recurring dream of 710. He had lost a huge sum of
money by investing in a worthless Texas oil company. The
upsetting word OIL was being turned around in his dream
to keep him from waking up. I doubt if Freud would have
been able to interpret either of those numbers properly."
The name of the city in which one lives also plays a
major role in psychonumeranalytic diagnosis. Dr. Matrix
told me he had several patients from Pleasantville, in
northern Westchester County, New York, who were severely disturbed by the contrast between the town's name
and the kind of life they lived there as employees of
Reader's Digest. The exclusion of Jews from Bronxville, in
74
PHILADELPHIA
75
76
the minister's psychiatric clinic was the late Smiley Blanton; that Lyndon Johnson greatly admired the art of Norman Rockwell because Rockwell's political views lay between the extremes of Rockwell Kent on the left and
George Rockwell on the right: that Norman Mailer's father, I. B. Mailer of Brooklyn, obviously became an accountant because his initials were Z.B.M.
An amusing episode involved a patient named Smith.
He had come to Dr. Matrix for advice on how to cure himself of chronic constipation. Dr. Matrix was so annoyed by
this request-he felt that the man should have gone to a
medical doctor-that he told Smith to go home and do the
following. He was to write down any number of three
digits, provided the first and last digits had a difference of
at least two. He was then to reverse the number (write the
digits in reverse order) and subtract the smaller number
from the larger. The result was to be reversed again, but
this time the two numbers were to be added. The final
sum would be, Matrix said, a four-digit code word that
would tell him what he should do. The digits were to be
translated by means of the following key which Matrix
wrote on a card and gave to the man:
S M I T H
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 0
(Can the reader explain why this works out as it does?
See Answers, Seven, IV.)
Dr. Matrix spoke also of the subtle sexual symbolism invariably concealed in the names of the great love goddesses of the screen. Jean Harlow's last name is only one
letter away from HARLOT. Ursula Andress's last name is
only one letter away from UNDRESS. Among capital letters
the two strongest breast symbols are obviously M and B . It
77
PHILADELPHIA
78
Figure 12. "I Saw the Figure Five in Gold," Charles Henry
Demuth (Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Alfred
Stieglitz Collection, 1949)
9. Wordsmith College
6 r almost a year after Dr. Matrix and his daughter Iva had
disappeared from Philadelphia with a $50,000 donation to
Dr. Matrix's Psychonumeranalytical Institute, neither I nor
the police had been able to discover their whereabouts.
Iva usually communicates with me in some cryptic way
after a suitable lapse of time, however, so I remained on
the alert for a message. One day I received a printed announcement of twelve public lectures on "Combinatorial
Aspects of English and American Literature," to be given
every Friday evening in Shade Auditorium at Wordsmith
College in New Wye, New York. Professor T. Ignatius
Marx of the mathematics department was the speaker. The
admission charge was $3 a lecture or $25 for the entire
series. The weekly topics were listed as follows:
1. The Acrostic Poem.
2. The Palindromic Poem.
3. Concealed and Accidental Verse.
4. Macaronic and Patchwork Verse.
5. Nonsense Verse from Jabberwocky to Gertrude
Stein.
6. Lipograms, Anagrams, Pangrams.
7. Misplaced Commas.
8. Keys to the Nomenclatures of Gulliuer's Travels, the
Oz Books, and Other Descriptions of Imaginary Lands.
82
WORDSMITH COLLEGE
83
puzzle, is an exercise in the great Lullian art of combinatorial thinking. A dictionary is like a box containing thousands of pieces of glass of different sizes, shapes, and colors. As an American poet, Jack Luzzatto, has written:
In orderly disorder they
Wait coldly columned, dead, prosaicPoet, breathe on them and pray
They bum with life in your mosaic.*
In addition to maximizing aesthetic values, Dr. Matrix
continued, the poet can fashion other remarkable kinds of
combinatorial patterns. The acrostic, in which initial letters of lines are in a meaningful order, is perhaps the oldest form of what Dr. Matrix called "meta-aesthetical verse
play." The earliest crude examples, he asserted, are fiund
in the Old Testament, where nine Psalms are "abecedarian acrostics," the initial letters of each stanza consisting of the Hebrew letters in alphabetical order.! The first
four of the five poems that make up the Book of Lamentations, Dr. Matrix said, are also acrostics of this type, as
well as the poem in Proverbs 31, verses 10 through 31,
which lists the virtues of the good wife.
Dr. Matrix picked up a pointer that had been leaning
against the lectern and tapped it on the floor. Before the
* This
is the last stanza of a two-stanza poem, "Dictionary," that appeared in the New York Times (July 25, 1958).
f In Finnegans Wake James Joyce is often, to use one of his own words,
"abcedminded." In two places he goes through the entire alphabei:
"Ada, Bett, Celia . . . Xenia, Yva, Zulma," and "apple, bacchante, custard . . xray, yesplease, zaza." There are dozens of instances in
which he goes part way, such as "Arty, Bert or possibly Charley
Chance," and "Arm bird colour defdum ethnic fort perhaps?" See Bernard Benstock's Joyce-Again's Wake (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1965), p. 28, and footnote on pp. 19-20.
84
WORDSMITH COLLEGE
85
88
WORDSMITH COLLEGE
87
88
WORDSMITH COLLEGE
89
90
WORDSMITH COLLEGE
91
92
with rules for combining them in ways derived from an intensive study of the work of ten contemporary poets. The
computer had typed out exactly one hundred copies of a
long poem, which, suitably bound in imitation leather,
could be obtained from Professor Mam for $50 a copy. It
was a most impressive poem, although many of its couplets, such as the following, were a bit on the dull side:
I've measured it from side to side;
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
Three weeks later a young instructor in Wordsmith's English department discovered that the poem the computer
had typed out was word for word the first version of William Wordsworth's narrative poem "The Thorn." By the
time the fraud was discovered, however, Marx and Miss
Toy were gone.
10. Squaresville
America is now a healthy country because the squares are taking over, and
God bless them.
-Herman Kahn, Newsweek,
July 4, 1976, page 30
94
* Before
SQUARESVILLE
95
was outfitted with conventional clothes, given a wristwatch, and assigned to a room in one of Squaresville's
forty-nine identical split-level houses.
"The nitty-gritty of our treatment," Dr. Matrix went on,
"is intensive conditioning in the art of square living. Each
room has color television. No one is allowed to move a
mattress to the floor or to squat cross-legged. The rooms
are kept supplied with free cigarettes. Everyone has three
square meals a day, including a compulsory martini before
dinner."
"I've been told," I said, "that mathematics is part of
your therapy."
"Yes, an essential part. When these freaked-out youngsters come to us, they've been flying for months in a
dreamworld. We bring them down to earth by teaching
them there are laws of nature, laws that can be ignored
only at great peril. We show them that they can be as high
as they like but if they jump out a window they won't float
gently down-the law of gravity will kill them. We teach
them there are also laws of health and laws of morality.
The life game, like any other game, is no game at all without rules."
"I still don't see how mathematics is involved."
"I'm getting to that. The hippies, you see, have learned
to overvalue disorder. The random curves of their psychedelic art and the whirling patterns inside their circular
mandalas are symbolic of this. Our job is to teach them the
beauties of the straight-sided square. We explain how uncurved borders make it possible for squares to fit together
without waste space. We show that, as the world population increases, square shapes become necessary for packing into cities, suburbs, subways, commuter trains. In its
interior every square has secret incommensurable quali-
96
ties, and as many curves as you like can be drawn inside it,
but its straight exterior is absolutely essential for close
packing."
"I'm beginning to anticipate," I said. "The numerical
equivalent of the square is of course the square number."
"Precisely. We begin our conditioning at the lowest
levels of arithmetic. First we teach our patients that a
square of side n must have an area of n squared. Then
slowly, by displaying the elegant properties of square
numbers, we convince them that two power is much more
beautiful than flower power. We start with simple things,
such as the fact that no square number can end in 2, 3, 7,
or 8, and that the last digits of squares, as you go up the
ladder, endlessly repeat the palindromic cycle 1,4, 9,6,5,
6, 9, 4, 1, with a 0 separating each cycle. [See Answers,
Ten, opening section.] We show how to find the digital
root of a number by adding its digits and casting out 9's
until only one digit is left. All squares, they discover, have
digital roots of 1, 4, 7, or 9. These also repeat a palindromic cycle, 1, 4, 9, 7, 7, 9, 4, 1, only now the cycles are
punctuated by 9's instead of 0's."
"Those are useful rules for puzzle buffs," I said. "I remember one instance. I knew that 12,345,678,987,654,321
is the square of 111,111,111 and I wondered if
98,765,432,123,456,789 could also be a square. I wasted
twenty minutes extracting the square root before I remembered the digital-root test. Since the number has a digital
root of 8, it can't be a square."
Dr. Matrix nodded. "We also teach patients that if a
square's last two digits are alike and not 00, they must be
44, and that 144 is the smallest example."
"Can a square end in three 4'sT"
"Yes. The smallest is 1,444. Then comes a big jump. You
might ask your readers to see if they can find the next
SQUARESVILLE
97
98
SQUARESVILLE
99
100
SQUARESVILLE
101
102
104
46. The last three letters, ney, are 14,5, and 25, which add
to 44. The name is balanced 46/44. This ratio indicates, Dr.
Matrix said, that George Romney is fairly well balanced
but leans slightly to the left.
"If a name has an odd number of letters, as in the case of
Nixon, the central letter, called the 'fulcrum,' is ignored
because its weight contributes to neither side. Ni has a
sum of 23, on a sum of 29, indicating that Nixon leans 6
points to the right. William Buckley, though not a presidential candidate, has a 26/42 ratio, a large unbalance of 16
points to the right. This ratio is exceeded however, Dr.
Matrix pointed out, by Dr. Benjamin Spock's unbalance of
35/14, or 21 points to the left.
"Among leading contenders for the presidency, Dr. Matrix declared, President Johnson is the most unbalanced.
Joh adds to 33, son to 48, a strong bias of 15 points to the
right. The only completely balanced contender is Nelson
Rockefeller, who has a ratio of 52/52. '52 is an unusually
heavy weight,' Dr. Matrix said, 'indicating that Rocky
would draw heavy support from both right and left voters.'
"When asked about Shirley Temple, Dr. Matrix smiled
and pointed out that 'Temple' works out to 38/33, a slight
leftward list for the Good Ship Lollipop. But, he added,
Shirley's campaign for Congress was under her married
name of Black. This indicates, he said, that among all the
dark-horse possibilities for president, Shirley is obviously
the darkest. 'The name Black does balance with a 14/14
ratio,' he admitted, 'but the weight on both sides is so
small that I'm afraid Mrs. Black must be considered a
lightweight contender.' " [Mrs. Black is now, appropriately, the U.S. ambassador to the black nation, Ghana.-
M.G.]
As it turned out, Nixon became the Republican presidential candidate, with Spiro Agnew (20 points right!) as
105
FIFTH AVENUE
107
108
66
* For the numerology of 37 see Charles W. Trigg, "A Close Look at 37,"
Journal of Recreutiotwl Muthemutics 2 (1969):117-128.
FIFTH AVENUE
109
110
Figure 14. Three spelling matrices. Fill the one at bottom right
to spell RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON
FIFTH AVENUE
111
112
FIFTH AVENUE
113
114
FIFTH AVENUE
115
116
The minimal-length bracelet showing all possible quadruplets of jade and pearl beads will have 24, or sixteen,
beads. It was such a bracelet that Dr. Matrix had prepared
for Iva. Go in either direction around that bracelet (Figure
15), taking the beads four at a time, and you will be able to
check off all sixteen combinations of 1 and 0 (with the 1
standing for jade and the 0 for pearl, or vice versa); the sixteen arrangements correspond to binary forms of the
numbers 0 through 15.
Reversing the order of the beads provides no new solution. In this case, however, the complement (obtained by
interchanging colors) does produce a new solution. There
are eight basically different arrangements that solve the
triplet problem, considering complements as being different but not reversals. The reader knows of two: the one
shown and its complement. Can he find the other six? (See
Answers, Twelve, 11.)
On the busy sidewalk outside Tiffany's, while Iva was
admiring her bracelet, Dr. Matrix extended his hand.
"Sorry I have other plans and can't join you two for dinner
and the evening."
"So am I," I said as we gripped hands, but I didn't really
mean it.
A ~ e the
r historic completion in J U I 1969
~ of the A ~ O Z Z O
11 moon mission it occurred to me that Dr. Matrix might
118
THE MOON
119
120
THE MOON
121
* This was dramatically confirmed on the fourth day of May 1970, when
four students at Kent State University in Ohio (note that both KENT
and OHIO havefour letters) died after being shot by National Guardsmen. It was the climax of student protests against the Vietnam War.
1960 was the year that students began their previous great wave of protests against racial discrimination in the South. The first such protest
was a sit-in on February 1 when four black students in Greensboro,
North Carolina, refused to move fiom a lunch counter where they were
denied service.
122
THE MOON
123
1%
THE MOON
127
14. Honolulu
HONOLULU
129
130
HONOLULU
131
. ."
132
HONOLULU
133
134
never told her what it meant and Mary tries to guess. The
initials of Catch Your Elbow? Clean Your Ears? Clever
Young Egg? It's curious Mary didn't see that her 'cold eye'
is the clue. Take out olde and her youthful nickname is
left."
Dr. Matrix took my king's pawn with his queen and said,
"Check."
I gave a start. It was a ploy I had failed to see. The only
way I could escape checkmate and not lose my queen was,
of course, to interpose my bishop. I moved it back to the
square in front of my king. The threatened mate was
blocked, but now I would surely lose my king's knight.
On the other hand, the black king would be exposed, and
with an open file for my rook perhaps I could mount a
quick counterattack.
"Can we move on to numbers?" I asked. "As you know,
I like to give my readers little problems. Any curious
number puzzles that are new?"
"In this age of digital computers," Dr. Matrix replied,
"they turn up every month by the hundreds. Robert E.
Smith, a mathematician with the Control Data Corporation, told me how a student at one of his company's institutes improved on an ancient result given by Plato. In his
Laws, book 5, Plato recommends that a city be divided
into plots of land so that the number of plots has as many
proper divisors as possible. He suggests 5,040 because it
has fifty-nine divisors, a rather large number. [This includes 1 but not 5,040.1 Your readers who have access to
computers, even some who don't, might like to know that
the largest number of proper divisors a number less than
10,000 can have is sixty-three, which tops Plato's number
by four divisors. There are just two such sixty-three-divisor
numbers. One is 9,240."
"Delightful," I said. "I'll ask our readers to try to find
the other one." (See Answers, Fourteen, I.)
HONOLULU
135
136
"One more stupid pun," Iva said,. wagging a scarletnailed forefinger in my face, "and the deal's off."
I was about to add that I had great difficulty getting
myself properly oriented in Honolulu, and that I was more
interested in bottomology than topology, but I kept my
mouth shut.
15. Houston
0 speculators about perpetual motion,
how many vain chimeras have you
created in the like quest? Go and take
your place with the seekers of gold!
-Leonard0 da Vinci
A startling letter from Bing Soph, an old fiiend now living in Houston, arrived in my mail early in August 1971.
Soph informed me that an elderly man from Wales, calling
himself Llewelyn Hooker, Jr., had created a considerable
stir in Houston with his claim to have invented a perpetual
motion machine. A small working model of the device was
on display in the lobby of the plush Shamrock-Hilton
Hotel, where Hooker and his pretty assistant, Miss Jacquelyn Jones, were selling stock for the Hooker Dynamaforce
Corporation.
Soph enclosed the company's handsomely printed prospectus. It outlined Hooker's scheme to build a gigantic
dynamaforce generator on the Houston Ship Channel.
Not only would dynamaforce provide cheap, unlimited
power for the area; it would cut the nation's air pollution
in half as soon as the clean dynamaforce motor replaced
the dirty internal-combustion engine. The prospectus contained no pictures of Hooker or Jones, but Soph had mentioned that the tall, bearded Hooker had green eyes and a
prominent nose, and that Miss Jones's attractive features
were unmistakably Eurasian.
I more than suspected that Hooker and Jones were none
other than the notorious numerologist Dr. Irving Joshua
138
HOUSTON
139
HOUSTON
141
142
HOUSTON
@ B
s-4-1
C @ E
143
F G H @ J
K L M N O P Q @ S T U V @ X Y @
1-4-0
W I Z A R D
144
HOUSTON
145
sunbaked inferno. Heat waves shimmered over the spotless concrete. The traffic on Main Street was heavy, and
this brought to mind a letter from a reader, George E.
Mallinson, who pointed out that the initials of Charles A.
Reich, the author of The Greening of America, are
C.A.R.-that complicated nongreen mechanism whose
engine has become such a sooty albatross around the neck
of the world.
Low in the eastern sky, over the oil refineries and chemical factories bordering the Houston Ship Channel, floated
a brownish haze, a baleful by-product of twentiethcentury
seekers of black gold. It was a haze that would take more
than dynamaforce to dissipate.
CLAIRVOYANCE TEST
147
thinking too long or hard about what the target might be.
Write your answers on a sheet of paper, and when you
have finished the test, compare your answers with the
given targets to see how many hits you have made. A score
of more than fifteen hits indicates, according to the literature of the California school, an extremely high degree of
clairvoyant ability.
1. Draw a circle around any one of the sixteen numbers
in Figure 22. Cross out all cells in the same row and column. Draw a circle around one of the remaining nine
numbers. Cross out the cells in its row and column. Circle
one of the four remaining numbers. Cross out its row and
column. Circle the single number that is left. Add the four
circled numbers and write down the sum.
2. From an unused matchbook, which should have
twenty matches, tear out any number of matches up to
nine and discard them. Count the matches that remain.
148
Add the two digits of this number, then tear that many
matches from the book and put them aside. Tear out two
more matches. Write down the number of matches still in
the matchbook.
3. From a deck of fifty-two playing cards remove the red
queens, the black aces, the red fours, the six of clubs, and
the jack of diamonds. Shuffle the deck, hold it face down
and take the cards in pairs from the top. If the first pair
contains a red and a black card, turn it face down and discard it. If both cards are red, put them face up on the table
to start a pile of red pairs. If both cards are black, put them
face up at another spot on the table to form a pile of black
pairs. Continue through the deck in this fashion, discarding all red-black pairs and building up the piles of red-red
and black-black pairs. When you finish, count the cards in
each pile. Subtract the smaller number from the larger and
write down the difference.
4. Draw a simple geometric figure. Inscribe within it
another and different simple geometric figure.
5. Write the name of a wild beast.
6. Place two dice, A and B, on the table, any side up.
Add the number on the top of A to the number on the bottom of B, then find the chapter of Genesis (in a King James
Bible) that corresponds to the sum. Locate the verse indicated by the sum of the top of B and the bottom of A. Write
the first word of that verse.
7. Think of any number, k, between 10 and 50. Place
your finger on the bottom ESP symbol in Figure 23. Say
"One." Tap the next symbol above it, saying "Two," and
continue upward, counting aloud with each tap. When you
come to the star, turn right and proceed counterclockwise
around the circle, tapping and counting until you reach k.
This may take you more than once around the circle. If it
does, ignore the tail portion of the illustration.
150
M e r you tap the symbol on the count of k, stop and reverse direction, then tap and count from 1 to k as before,
but this time go around the circle clockwise. The symbol
you tapped for k should get the count of 1. (Do not make
the mistake of starting the count on the symbol next to it.)
Ignore the tail portion. Stop when you reach k again and
write down the symbol just tapped.
8. Write a two-digit number between 10 and 50 that
meets the following provisos: both digits must be odd and
the digits must not be alike. (For example, 11 is ruled out
because the same digit is repeated.)
9. Take any twenty cards from the deck and hold them
face down. Turn the top pair of cards face up, leaving them
on top of the packet, and cut the packet at any spot. Again
reverse the top two cards and cut. Continue turning pairs
and cutting for as long as you like. In reversing top pairs
you will, of course, sometimes turn reversed cards face
down again, but it does not matter. The procedure is designed to randomize the number of reversed cards in the
packet.
Deal the randomized cards in a row on the table, taking
care not to reverse any cards as you do so. Now turn over
all the cards in even positions (2, 4, 6, . . , 20). Count
the number of cards that are face up in the row and write
that number.
10. Form three equal piles of raisins on the table. There
must be at least four raisins in each pile, and the number
in each pile must be the same. Call the piles A, B, and C..
Take two raisins from A and put them in B.
Take three raisins from C and put them in B.
Count the raisins in A, then take the same number from
B and put them in either A or C.
Take one raisin from either A or C and put it in B.
Write the number of raisins in B.
CLAIRVOYANCE TEST
151
152
CLAIRVOYANCE TEST
153
154
CLAIRVOYANCE TEST
155
156
CLAIRVOYANCE TEST
157
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PYRAMID LAKE
159
160
Styrofoam models in Czechoslovakia. When Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder reported this in their 1970
best seller Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, it
kicked off what Time called a "minicraze" in the U.S. and
Canada.
Max Toth's Toth Pyramid Company of Bellerose, New
York, sells a colored cardboard razor-blade sharpener.
In Glendale, California, G. Patrick (G.P. for Great Pyramid?) Flanagan sells a Cheops Pyramid Tent made of
vinyl. You sit inside it to improve your transcendental
meditation. Gloria Swanson, reported Time, sleeps with a
pyramid under her bed because it makes "every cell in my
body tingle." James Coburn likes to meditate in his pyramid tent.
Eric McLuhan, eldest son of Marshall McLuhan, has
been doing reasearch on pyramid power. A cover story
about him in the February 1973 issue of enRoute (a magazine published for Air Canada passengers) is based on an
interview with Eric when he was teaching "creative electronics" at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. Eric
tells of putting one piece of hamburger in the center of his
Plexiglas pyramid and another on the floor of the pyramid.
Three months later the meat in the center was still fresh.
The other was unfit to eat. Eric believes the pyramid's
shape alters gravitational and magnetic fields inside and
above it. The dull edge of a razor blade is not improved,
he says, unless its edge is kept aligned on a north-south
magnetic axis. Blue steel blades work better than stainless
steel. John Rode, who runs an occult bookstore in Toronto,
experimented with Iarger pyramids. He has dehydrated
hundreds of eggs and ten pounds of porterhouse steak. "It
takes," Rode declares, "about twenty-three days to halt the
decaying process in meat. . . . We've fried the steaks and
eaten them. They're delicious."
A1 G. Manning, head of the ESP Laboratory in Los
PRYAMID LAKE
161
162
...
. .
PRYAMID LAKE
163
politician (he was once governor of California) who discovered the lake in 1844. My father had marked the passage
in which Frkmont describes the 300-foot-high calcareous
formation called Pyramid Rock: "We encamped along the
shore, opposite a very remarkable rock
which from
the point we viewed it, presented a pretty exact outline of
the Great Pyramid of Cheops." (See Figure 28.)
I stopped at Sutcliffe to buy a fishing license. Pyramid
Lake is entirely within the huge Pyramid Lake Indian
...
PRYAMID LAKE
165
Reservation owned by the Paiute Indians. One is not allowed to fish without a permit obtained from tribal officers. After getting my permit I drove north on the deserted dusty road that winds along the lake's barren
western shore.
The day was warm and cloudless. Through the right
window of my car I could see, beyond the sagebrush, the
deep Prussian blue of the lake. Jagged spires and pinnacles along the opposite shore were casting purple
shadows over the water, and above the turrets the Lake
Range mountains undulated in soft shades of green and
pink. Just before entering Pyramid I turned off on a side
road, as Iva had instructed. The road led into a beautiful
hidden canyon, and soon ended at a massive factory building of steel and concrete. It had been built in the shape of
the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Large blood-red numerals
gleamed on the structure's edges.
A pudgy Paiute opened the front door for me. He
grinned broadly, revealing a mouth that contained only a
single front tooth. (His name was Ree, I later learned. Everyone called him One-Tooth Ree.) Down the hall and
walking toward me came Iva and her father. Iva was wearing bright orange pants, a beaded Indian headband, and a
charm bracelet of little silver pyramids that jangled pleasantly as she walked. We embraced. Dr. Matrix stood by,
tall and bony, his canny green eyes glittering behind
rimless pentagonal spectacles.
They took me on a quick tour of the factory. In one wing
about twenty Indians were assembling the six-inch pyramid models. In another wing a smaller group of Indians
were cutting and packaging the unassembled sides of the
larger model. Iva excused herself, and I followed Dr. Matrix up a helical stairway to his office in the factory's apex.
Psi-org, Dr. Matrix explained, leaning back in his desk
166
chair and touching fingertips to fingertips, combines abbreviations for psychic and orgone energy. They are different names for the same force. The psi field, which produces the human aura and is reponsible for all psychic
powers, is none other than what Wilhelm Reich, Freud's
controversial Austrian disciple, called orgone energy.
"I remember Reich's orgone," I said. "It comes from
outer space. It makes the stars twinkle, the sky blue, and
Orson Bean happy." *
"Precisely," said Dr. Matrix. "The hundreds of pyramid
islands in Pyramid Lake trap the energy and this gives the
strong blue color to the water. Reich's great discovery, as
you know, was that orgone could be accumulated by building a box with wood on the outside and sheet iron on the
inside. The organic material lets orgone through; the metal
interior reflects. What I call the 'bluehouse effect' takes
over. Abnormally high concentrations of psi-org energy
build up inside the box. Reich's basic idea was sound, but
he had the shape of his box wrong. The Egyptians knew
all about psi-org energy. They used it, you know, to float
heavy stones across the desert when they built their pyramids. They were the first to discover that the shape of the
Great Pyramid concentrated psi-org. I was the first to discover that if this shape is combined with Reich's principle
of laminated substances, the bluehouse effect increases by
a factor of 777. I call it the pi-phi-psi pyramid."
"But your pyramids aren't laminated," I said. "They're
just single sheets of Plexiglas."
"Wrong," said Dr. Matrix. "Examine them more care-
* I had recently read Orson Bean's naive little book Me and the Orgone
(New York: Fawcett paperback, 1972). For a good recent summary of
Reich's orgone energy claims (as funny as any of Orson's comedy routines), see David Boadella's paperback Wilhelm Reich (New York:
Dell, 1975).
PYRAMID LAKE
167
fully and you'll see that every side consists of two thin
layers of plastic. Each sheet is made with a different and
secret formula. The outer layer transmits psi-org, the inner
layer reflects it."
"Has this been verified?'
"To the hilt. We've done hundreds of carefully controlled tests under the supervision of Dr. Harald Puton, a
very competent Belgian physicist who was active in the
Scientology movement in Brussels a few years ago. He
found that every form of psi energy is increased by sitting
under a pi-phi-psi pyramid. One is more telepathic, more
clairvoyant, more precognitive. It is easier to initiate outof-body experiences. Uri Geller, the Israeli psychic, visited us a few weeks ago and found that when he was inside the pyramid, any metal object he touched melted instantly. Psychic healing is enormously accelerated. Last
week One-Tooth brought in his sister. She'd broken her
left leg. After one hour in a pyramid her leg was as good
as new."
Was Dr. Matrix smiling faintly? It is always hard to
know where his beliefs end and deception begins. The
body's aura, he continued, is more intense inside a pyramid. He took from his desk two Kirlian photographs of a
living butterfly. The one made outside the pyramid
showed only a faint white aura. The one made inside
showed a bright blue aura that extended several inches
beyond the butterfly's wings.
"Would you mind explaining the significance of these
numbers?" I asked, pointing to the scarlet numerals on a
pyramid paperweight.
Dr. Matrix did not mind. Each of the pyramid's eight
edges, he said, bears a different number in the set of
integers from 1 through 10. At each vertex (the four base
comers and the apex) the sum of all edges meeting at that
168
PYRAMID LAKE
169
170
."
* E. B. Escott, in 1905, showed that 1, 3,6,55, 66, and 666 are the only
PYRAMID LAKE
171
172
174
175
176
Figure 29. What was the population of the world when Cain
killed Abel? (Engraving by Dore)
Thanks to Felix Just, S.J., for providing digitized copies of the Dore images.
Thanks to Felix Just, S.J., for providing digitized copies of the Dor images.
179
had ended ("For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain
. ." Gen. 7:4) before starting the Flood.
From the thousands of notes Dr. Matrix has on individual numbers I shall mention only a few that caught my attention. The "two hundred thousand thousand"
(200,000,000) horsemen in Revelation 9:16 is identified as
the largest integer explicitly mentioned in the Bible. The
first integer to be mentioned is also the smallest, the ordinal 1 ("first day") of Genesis 1:5. The smallest integer
not mentioned in the Bible, Dr. Matrix asserts in the same
note, is 43.
On the 153 fishes caught in the unbroken net (John
21:ll) Dr. Matrix first repeats Augustine's analysis in Tractates on the Gospel of Saint John. We take 10 (ten commandments) as a symbol of the old dispensation and 7
(seven gifts of the spirit) as a symbol of the new. They add
to 17, and the sum of the integers 1through 17 is 153. Dr.
Matrix points out that 17 is the seventh (holiest) prime.
When 153 is written in binary (10011001), it is palindromic.* On the 276 shipwrecked souls (Acts 27:37) Dr. Matrix observes that 276 is the sum of the fifth powers of 1,2,
and 3.
The number 490-the "seventy times seven" that Jesus
told Peter was the number of times one should forgive a
brother's sins (Matt. 18:22)-is,
Dr. Matrix tells us, the
number of ways 19 can be partitioned into positive integers that add to 19. It appears in Daniel 9:24 as "seventy
weeks." If one exceeds 490 sins by committing a 491st (the
basis of Vilgot Sjoman's 1965 film titled 491), the ordinal
number of that unforgivable sin is a prime. "Moreover,"
adds Dr. Matrix, "it is the sum of the squares of the primes
180
181
182
formulas and said, "It's all here." Pauli studied the formulas carefully, frowned, looked up, and said, "Das ist
falsch."
There are three passages in Revelation (7:4, 14:1, and
14:3) that speak of 144,000 redeemed saints standing before God's throne, singing a new song, with God's name
written on their foreheads. As Revelation 7 makes clear,
they represent 12,000 saints from each of the 12 tribes of
Israel (see also Matt. 19:28). Dr. Matrix devotes several
pages to the history of how this has been interpreted by
biblical commentators, from Origen to such contemporary
Adventist sects as Jehovah's Witnesses and the SeventhDay Adventists. The Witnesses believe an invisible resurrection began in 1918 and that exactly 144,000 saints eventually will go to heaven in contrast to millions who will
never die on earth. Seventh-Day Adventists believe that
144,000 living saints will be translated to heaven on the
day of the Second Coming.
Drawing on his extensive knowledge of early Adventist
literature, Dr. Matrix quotes an amusing passage from an
early prophetic vision of Mrs. Ellen Gould White, the remarkable woman who founded the Adventist movement.
Mrs. White, in a trance, saw the 144,000 saints standing on
a sea of glass in "a perfect square." She failed to realize,
writes Dr. Matrix, that the square root of 144,000 is not 120
or 1,200 but the irrational number 379.4733+.
Years later, Dr. Matrix tells us, when Mrs. White wrote
her most famous book, The Great Controversy Between
Christ and Satan, she described the totality of the redeemed as standing "in a hollow square, with Jesus in the
midst." In later editions this became "The glittering ranks
are drawn up in the form of a hollow square about their
King, whose form rises in majesty above saint and angel."
Perhaps, Dr. Matrix reasons, the subset of 144,000 trans-
183
184
net. The last three decimal digits are obtained from the
first two (5, 3) by raising 5 to the power of 3.
To appreciate how remarkable it is that a complex fraction of four numbers would remain the same after this radical kind of transformation, the reader is asked to search
for four other integers, all different, that will form a complex fraction having the same property. (See Answers,
Eighteen, 111.)
Revelation 7:9 speaks of the total number of the saved as
'ta great multitude, which no man could number." If no
man can number them, reasons Dr. Matrix, then the saved
must form an uncountable infinite set. Since the number of
human beings that will have lived on the earth must necessarily be a finite number, we must conclude that an uncountable number of planets in the universe bear intelligent life. If the number of such planets were
countable, the number of souls on all of them, at any given
moment of cosmic history, would also be countable, thus
contradicting Revelation.
Dr. Matrix finds a lively interest in mathematics
throughout the Old Testament. Acknowledging his debt to
G. J. S. Ross, a mathematician at the University of Carnbridge, Dr. Matrix points out that "men began to multiply"
(Gen. 6:l) as soon as they were created and continued to
do so in New Testament times (2 Pet. 1:2; 2 Cor. 9:lO).
They performed division (Gen. 15:lO; Num. 31:27), addition (2 Pet. 1:5), and subtraction (Gen. 18:28). They
learned how to extract "the roots thereof" (Ezek. 17:9) and
how to wrestle "against powers" (Eph. 6:12).
As for geometry, great rulers were brought down (Ps.
136:17), and from Syracuse they "fetched a compass" (Acts
28:13). Noah constructed an ark. The ancient Hebrews
were familiar with "axes" (1 Sam. 13:21), and David re-
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186
1:ll-16, a fifty-eight-word sequence beginning "to Babylon" and ending with "begat Joseph the husband." Dr.
Matrix attributes the 1973 discovery of this passage to Andrew Griscom of Menlo Park, California. When every adjacent pair of words has no letter in common, the sequence
is called heteroliteral. The longest passage of this kind
known was discovered in 1975 by Tom Pulliam of Somerset, New Jersey. It is a sequence of eighteen words from
Psalms 62:l-2, starting with "my salvation" and ending
with "I shall not be."
The practice of "consulting" the Bible for help in solving a personal problem was common throughout the Middle Ages. The ritual varied, but those who took it seriously
usually spent several days in prayer and fasting before
opening the Bible at random, then reading the first passage that caught their eye. Similar practices were common
in non-Christian cultures. The Greeks consulted Homer,
the Romans consulted Virgil, the Moors consulted the
Koran, and so on. Although from time to time the Church
issued decrees forbidding the practice, medieval history is
filled with stories about how lives were dramatically altered by it. Dr. Matrix identifies many biblical verses that
played such roles, notably Romans 13:13, 14, to which
Augustine attributes his conversion. As Augustine tells it
in his Confessions, book 8, he was sitting under a fig tree,
greatly agitated, when he heard a child's voice singing
"Tolle lege, tolle lege" ("Take up and read"). He picked
up a copy of Paul's epistles, opened it at random and read
the passage that transformed his life.
I had not been aware until I saw Dr. Matrix's comments
on Proverbs, chapter 11, that the chapter, with its thirtyone verses, was widely used in medieval fortune-telling.
One simply consults the verse corresponding to the day of
187
Thanks to Felix Just, S.J., for providing digitized copies of the Dor images.
189
19. Calcutta
\\
CALCUTTA
191
that obscured the sides of his face, but Zuleika's smiling countenance was unobstructed. Although her skin was dark and the
caste mark of Shiva-three horizontal lines-decorated her
wide forehead, there was no mistaking those lovely Japanese
eyes. It was Iva, the Eurasian daughter of Dr. Matrix!
How appropriate, I thought. Remove the first two letters of
"Shiva" and you have Iva. I cabled Sam that I would be in
Calcutta the following Monday.
It had been ten years since I had last visited Sam, but as the
bus creaked and crepitated its way from Durn Dum Airport to
the Grand Hotel the old familiar smell of Calcutta invaded the
open windows. It was 4:00 A.M.-hot, foggy and windless.
Except for a few new tall buildings the city looked the
same. The pavements were littered with the pitiful bodies of
the poor, lying under their dirty cotton cloths like corpses
under shrouds. Indeed, by daylight many of the bodies
would turn out to be corpses. A few cows wandered about
looking for garbage. Here and there an early riser was
washing himself at a fire hydrant or relieving himself in an
alley.
Does any city in the world bring a visitor more starkly
face to face with hunger, suffering, and death? In Calcutta
there is only one way to avoid going mad. You must look on
the city as you would a Hollywood set. None of it is real. It is
a horror show in living color, thrown on a wide screen for
your loathing and fascination.
I found Sam later that morning in his cluttered office on
the second floor of a low building in the heart of the city. He
too had not changed noticeably: he was still a slim, energetic
young man with handsome features, a black mustache and
goatee and coal black eyes. Sam is a Zoroastrian Parsee from
Bombay. Like all magic buffs we wasted no time on idle
conversation but immediately sat down to exchange the
latest card tricks.
Sam was eager to meet Dr. Matrix. He knew that the
192
194
here."
'I sent you a copy of my new Scribner's book, The Incredible
Dr. Matrix. Did you get it?"
Iva nodded as she opened the office door. "Then I lost it.
Once I put it down I just couldn't pick it up again. But you boys
must excuse me. I'll see you later."
Dr. Matrix's tall figure rose from behind his desk. His hair
and beard were dyed snow white and his skin dark brown, but
there was no way short of plastic surgery to alter his enormous
hawklike nose. Black eyebrows divided emerald eyes from the
painted stripes of Shiva on his forehead.
"Welcome to Calcutta," he said in a clipped British accent.
"Sit down and I'll tell you about PM."
It was in the Himalayas, as a disciple of Swami Fondahondashankarbabasaranwrapi, that Dr. Matrix had learned the
five basic principles of PM. The swami, whose smiling oil portrait
was on the wall behind Dr. Matrix's desk, called his approach
Basic Meditation. Dr. Matrix had changed the name because its
abbreviation would give rise to gibes in English-speaking
countries.
"The first principle of PM," said DM, "is: What is, is not.
We call it nonest. The universe, including you and me, is no
more than a monstrous stage illusion conjured up by Brahma
while his colleague Shiva dances in the wings. It is all beautifully
symbolized in the nutaraia (See Figure 33). The universe has just
begun one of its endless cycles. The ring of fire is the fireball of
the 'big bang.' The drum in Shiva's upper right hand beats out
the nonestic rhythms of space-time. The flame in his upper left
hand is the energy that upholds and finally devours the world.
His lower right hand is raised in a gesture meaning 'Fear not.'
His lower left hand points to an uplifted foot that signifies
release from the bondage of maya: the powerful magic spell
that causes the uninitiated to believe the world is real."
Dr. Matrix had picked up a small ivory nutaraja on his
desk. "Who's the dwarf under Shiva's foot? I asked.
CALCUTTA
195
196
CALCI'TTA
197
198
CALCUTTA
199
200
CALCUTTA
201
20. Stanford
The emotion consisted wholly of glee
and admiration; glee at the vividness
which such an abstract idea or verbal
term as 'earthquake' could put on when
translated into sensible reality and verified concretely; and admiration at the
way in which the frail little wooden
house could hold itself together in spite
of such a shaking. I felt no trace whatever of fear; it was pure delight and
welcome.
'Go it,' I almost cried aloud, 'and go it
stronger!'
-William James at Stanford
University, 5:30 A.M., April 18, 1906,
reacting to the San Francisco earthquake
\\
STANFORD
203
204
STASFORD
205
208
STANFORD
207
208
STANFORD
U)9
210
STANFORD
211
cocktails."
"Will I have to listen to punk rock?" Persi asked apprehensively, cupping his hands over his ears.
"No," said Iva. "There's a punk girl group appearing there
called the Palmdale Bulges, but they don't start until nine in the
evening."
Iva vanished for a moment, then returned with two long black
leather overcoats. She handed one to Dr. Matrix, who had
walked over to stand facing her. And then we saw an astonishing thing.
Each of them held an overcoat in front of the other, then
each simultaneously let go of the coat with his (her) left hand
and pushed his (her) left arm through the left sleeve of the coat
opposite. Still facing each other and acting in unison, each of
them then put his (her) left arm around the other's right side
and with his (her) left hand grasped the top of the coat as the
right hand carried it behind the other's left shoulder. Each now
dropped the coat from the right hand, carried the coat around
the other's back with his (her) left hand, then each pushed his
(her) right arm into the right sleeve. Now they were wearing
their own overcoats, and they were still facing each other. The
ritual was executed so rapidly that it was over before Persi and
I could observe just how they did it. Iva told me later, when she
helped me to write the above instructions, that it was an old
Japanese vaudeville routine.
As we walked past the entrance to the laboratory I sniffed
the air. "I smell punk," 1said.
"Shhh," said Iva. "If you don't talk about it, maybe no one
will notice."
21. Chautauqua
Computers don't actually think. You
-Theodor H. Nelson,
Dream Machines
F o r years computer scientists who are also experts in linguistics have been working on systems to enable computers
to converse with human operators in a natural spoken language. Progress on such systems has been disappointingly
slow. As of today only the most trivial and stylized dialogue
can be carried on, usually in the form of typed sentences
with an extremely limited vocabulary.
On the other hand, science-fiction fans have been familiar
with talking computers for more than half a century. The
marvelous machines have even appeared in children's fantasy literature: as early as 1907 L. Frank Baum introduced
(in Ozma of Oz) a mechanical windup robot named TikTok, which according to its manufacturers could think,
speak, act and do "everything but live." In recent years,
through films such as Forbidden Planet and Star Wars, the
general public has become accustomed to talking robots and
to talking computers such as HAL, which ruled the spaceship
in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There are many signs of the new familiarity with such
ideas. For example, consider a toy robot that recently went
on sale: a child answers multiple-choice questions by pressing buttons on the robot's torso, and the robot comments (by
a prerecorded tape) on the quality of the answers. Moreover,
game-playing computer programs are improving rapidly.
For less than $300 one can buy a small chess-playing computer that will defeat good players. More sophisticated chess
programs are now approaching the master level. \?'hen the time
limit on moves is short enough, they can trounce even a
grandmaster.
For these reasons and others there was little skepticism when
advertisements began to appear announcing public demonstrations of ASXIOF, the world's first talking computer. The name
ASMOF was an acronym for the American Superior Mind
Operating Foundation, which was sponsoring demonstrations of the robot prototype to stimulate sales of stock. From
newspaper clippings readers began to send me, I gathered
that the robot featured a new magnetic-bubble memory. Its
circuitry was inside a 20-foot-high aluminum figure designed
to resemble a movie robot. The monster had two openings
where a person's eyes would be and a third eye with a rubycolored lens at the center of its massive forehead. There was
no nose, but a conical loudspeaker formed a kind of mouth.
At the public demonstrations the robot was seated behind a
large table and did not move. Occasionally a beam of crimson light shot from the third eye to scan the table or anyone
seated in a chair on the opposite side.
ASMOF began its tour of the country at the end of July,
making two-hour appearances at halls and theaters in large
cities and summer resorts. For an admission fee of $3, people
in the audience were allowed to sit across from ASMOF at the
table and ask it a reasonably brief question on any topic. The
robot replied in a husky mechanical voice and sometimes
engaged in humorous banter with a questioner before trying
to answer the question. It did not know everything. Occasionally it responded with remarks such as "Your problem would
take too long to compute," or "Sorry, madam, that information is not in my memory bank."
On special occasions an entire appearance was devoted to
combat with a local expert in some intellectual table game.
ASMOF seemed to be a top-level player of chess, checkers,
go, and even games with random elements such as back-
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216
was president or who won the baseball world series in suchand-such a season-facts that could easily be stored in a
computer's memory. Some of the questions, however, were
harder. I took extensive notes on those involving the kind of
mathematics and wordplay I thought would most interest my
readers.
For example, a young woman asked ASMOF for the longest word in the English language. After scanning the woman
with its ruby eye and complimenting her on her smile,
ASMOF asked: "Can the word be hyphenated?" The woman
replied yes. "In that case," said ASMOF, there is no longest
word. We can speak of a great-grandmother, a great-greatgrandmother, a great-great-great-grandmother, and so on.
Next question, please."
Here are a few other linguistic queries of an unusual nature. A woman asked for a ten-letter word of one syllable.
ASMOF came up with "scraunched." A young man asked
for an English word containing the sequence of adjacent
letters "nkst." After some conversation about the slogan on the
questioner's T-shirt, ASMOF gave an acceptable reply. The
man was followed by his brother, who asked a similar question about the sequence "nksh." This too was correctly answered. Can the reader supply a dictionary word containing
each sequence?
Children liked to test the robot with ridiculous riddles.
Sometimes ASMOF answered correctly. When it failed, it always asked for the answer to store in its memory and occasionally praised the child for having stumped it. I find in my
notes that one elderly man, a professor emeritus of Enghh at
the nearby State University of New York at Buffalo, asked a
literary riddle that was new to me. He wanted to know what
Coleridge's ancient mariner and an inebriated shortstop had
in common. ASMOF promptly responded: "He stoppeth one
of three."
The most difficult word question was asked by a Shake-
...
218
CHAUTAUQUA
219
220
CHAUTAUQUA
221
222
22. Istanbul
The sons of the prophet are brave men
and bold,
And quite unaccustomed to fear,
But the bravest by far in the ranks of
the Shah
Was Abdul Abulbul Amir.
-Anonymous ballad
224
ISTANBUL
225
from the days of Ali Baba. As we pushed our way through the
crowds scrawny cats darted between our legs, and it seemed
that everywhere we turned there were young boys either shining shoes on luridly decorated boxes or hawking black-market
Marlboro cigarettes with shouts of "Mah-buh-ro." A strong scent
of spices almost masked the smells wafting from the surrounding waters.
Iva paused at a table of costume jewelry and after lengthy
haggling bought four inexpensive trinkets at four different
prices. One item, a pair of scarlet earrings, cost $1 in U.S.
currency. When the young shopkeeper, pretending to be angry
at the low settlement, added the four prices on his pocket
calculator, I noticed that he hit the multiplication button three
times instead of the addition button. When I pointed this out
in a whisper to Iva, she nodded but gave the man the $6.75 that
showed on the calculator's display.
"Why didn't you protest?" I asked as we elbowed our way to
another shop.
"Because," she replied, "I added the prices in my head and
they came to the same amount."
I did some scribbling on the back of an envelope. "By the
beard of the prophet!" I exclaimed. "You're right!"
Even more surprising, I later discovered that only one set of
four different prices that includes $1has $6.75 as both its product and its sum. In the answer section I shall give the solution to
this pleasant little problem in Diophantine analysis.
We lunched at the Havuzlu restaurant near the post office,
and for the next four hours Iva took me around the city. We
visited the Blue Mosque and the Topkapi Palace. We drove
past the old Byzantine walls west of the city. It was distressing
to see how many of the beautiful mosques are decaying. Some
are used now for storing soft drinks; others house squatters.
Once-elegant mosaic walls are pockmocked with gaps where
the tiles have fallen. Even the domes and spires are stained
brown from pollution, and it was difficult to see them through
226
ISTANBUL
227
Figure 35. Dr. Matrix's cube (left) cut to form three identical skew
pyramids (right)
of such a solid. If the central cube has a side of 2, the rhombic dodecahedron has a volume of 8 + (24/3), or 16. Moreover, if you make four identical yangmas, they will fit
together to form a pyramid that resembles the Great Pyramid of Egypt, with a 2-by-2 square base and four congruent
isosceles triangles as sides."
The skeleton of a rhombic dodecahedron with its 12 identical diamond faces is shown at the bottom of Figure 36. The
unfolded pyramid that can be made with four yangrnas is
shown at the top left in the illustration, and a fascinating toy
can be created by gluing six of these pyramids at their bases
to six square cells marked on a cross made of tape as is
shown at the top right. Paint the bottom of the tape red and
the sides of the pyramids blue. Folding the pyramids inward creates a solid red cube. Folding them outward creates a blue rhombic dodecahedron with a cubic interior hole.
With two such models it is possible to display a blue rhombic
dodecahedron, remove its "shell" to disclose an interior red
cube and fold the shell to make another red cube of the same
size. Each cube can then be opened into two identical blue
rhombic dodecahedrons,
Each corner of Dr. Matrix's ivory cube was marked with a
different digit from the set 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The digits
were cleverly placed, he told me, so that the sum of the two
228
Figure 36. Plans (top) for a toy that forms both a rhombic
dodecahedron (bottom)and a cube
230
232
There are many other order5 squares, but the order4 square is
truly extraordinary. Ignoring rotations and reflections, it is the
only possible square of this type.
Can similar squares be made with no-rep emirps? No,
because all primes except 2 and 5 end in 1,3,7, or 9: only those
four digits can border an emirp square, and so if the square is of
an order higher than 4, no outside prime will be free of
repetitions.
I wish I had space for more of Dr. Matrix's comments about
primes. He pointed out that the squares of the first seven
primes add to 666, and he mentioned the even more astounding
fact that if the English names for primes are alphabetized, the
first number on the list is 8,018,018,851. Is the last prime on this
list also determinable? Dr. Matrix thought it was, but he believed that a computer would be needed to find it.
At this point Iva, now dressed in gray silk pants and a yellow
blouse, came in with a tray holding three martinis. We chatted
about nonmathematical topics until the towers and domes of
Istanbul became black silhouettes against a flaming gold-red
sky. Far to the east, an almost invisible speck on the Black Sea's
horizon, glided the ruby yacht of Omar Khayyam. It was a
vision straight out of The Arabian Nights.
Beautiful sunsets, Iva remarked, were the only admirable
by-product of Istanbul's dirty air. Through the open window,
high above the city, floated the wailing of a muezzin, his call to
twilight prayer amplified by loudspeakers. (Mohammed disliked bells.)
Dr. Matrix unrolled an intricately tessellated prayer rug and
placed it on the floor with the point of its pattern directed
southeast. After removing his shoes he recited the Fatiha, the
first chapter of the Koran, in a loud voice. Then he knelt on the
rug to prostrate himself toward Mecca while Iva sat sipping her
martini with a bemused smile.
I spent several delightful days in Istanbul, and when I left, I
fancied I could see tears in Dr. Matrix's eyes. Did he have a
ISTASBL'L
233
One
238
Note that the sum differs in only one digit fi-om the fourdecimal value of pi.
For readers who may wonder how to go about solving a
cryptarithm, I quote a letter of Monte Dernham, of San
Francisco, who sent me the best explanation of how
Wayne's problem could be analyzed:
The repetition of 29' in the first and fourth lines necessitates zero for N and 5 for E, with unity carried to the
hundreds column. The double space preceding each
TEN requires that 0 in FORTY equal 9, with 2 carried
fiom the hundreds column, whence I denotes the unit
digit 1in 11, with F plus 1equal to S. This leaves 2,3,4,
6, 7, and 8 unassigned.
Since the hundreds column (viz., R plus 2T plus 1)
must be equal to or greater than 22, T and R must each
be greater than 5, relegating F and S to 2,3, and 4. Now
X is not equal to 3; else F and S could not be consecutive integers. Then X equals 2 or 4, which, it is readily
found, is impossible if T is equal to or less than 7. Hence
T equals 8, with R equal to 7 and X equal to 4. Then F
equals 2 and S equals 3, leaving the remaining letter, Y,
equal to 6.
For another excellent cryptarithm by Wayne, see chapter
18.
Two
2.40
All eight sunls are distinct, and only one diagonal sum, 22,
is outside the sequence.
Many order-4 and higher antimagic squares, with all sums
in consecutive order, were found by Lindon.
Charles I,\'. Trigg, ~\~riting
on "The Sums of Third Order
Anti-Magic Squares," Jolr~7zal of R~cl-ecrtioncil ~2/lcrtlze?ncrtics2
(1969): 2.50-234, showed that the eight sums of an order-3
antiinagic square ca~inotbe in ally arithmetic progression,
thus confirming Lindon's conjecture that they cannot be consecutive. He also proved that the eight su~rlscannot all be
el en.
In a note on "A Renlarkable Group of Xnt~magicSquares,"
l\fathe?ncrtzts ~\.ilcrgcrycrz~ne44 (1971): 13, Ti-igg exnmined the
e ~ g h tpatterns obtained bj placing 1 111 the center of the
three-b~-threearrav, the sequence 3, 5, 7, 9 111 the corners,
dnd the sequence 2, 4, 6, 8 111 the side cells. "Remnrkabh:
~vhetherthe sequences run clock~viseor counterclock~vise,
each of the eight essentiall~.distinct squares thus obtained is
antimagic."
The complerrlents of these eight squares are also antimagic. Tl'hen the foru broken diagonals are considered, it
turns out that each of the sixteen squares is also "alinost heterosquare in having only two duplicate sums. Corrlmenting
on problem 84 in the same magazine, 4 (1971):2XG-237.
Trigg has given a method that produces 108 order-3 arrays
that are alillost heterosquare. The total nu~llberof distinct
order-3 antimagic squares, and the number of distinct orderremain unkno~vn.
3 almost heterosq~~ares,
11.
36'
41'
24!2
243
...
. . .
1 3 2 1 2 0 1
1 0 2 1 2 0 1
...
. . .
244
The digits in these blocks are so arranged that if we substitute the three blocks for the three digits (replacing 1 with
one block, 2 with another, 3 with the third) in any stutterfree chain (e.g., any one of the three blocks), the resulting
chain will also be stutter-free. In this longer chain we can
now substitute blocks for digits once more to obtain a still
longer chain, and so on ad infinitum.
It is not possible to construct shorter palindromic blocks
(blocks that are the same backward as forward) that can be
used in this way, but shorter asymmetric blocks are possible. Allan Beek sent me a similar solution using the following asymmetric blocks of eleven digits each:
245
...
...
...
24f3
G. A. Hedlund and W. H. Gottschalk, "A Characterization of the Morse Minimal Set," Proceedings of the
American Mathematical Society 15 (1964):70-74.
Richard A. Dean, "A Sequence Without Repeats," American Mathematical Monthly 72 (1965):383385.
P. A. B. Pleasants, "Non-Repetitive Sequences," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 68
(1970):267-274.
T. C. Brown, "Is There a Sequence of Four Symbols in
Which No Two Adjacent Segments Are Permutations of
One Another?" American Mathematical Monthly 78
(1971):886-888.
R. C. Entringer, D. E. Jackson, and J. A. Schatz, "On
Nonrepetitive Sequences," Journal of Combinatorial
Theory, Series A, 16 (1974):159-164.
247
STEP 1
4x4=16
PUT 6 BELOW LINE, CARRY 1
STEP 2
WRITE 6 AS SECOND DlGlT
FROM END OF MULTIPLICAND
STEP 3
(4x6) 1=25
PUT 5 BELOW LINE, CARRY 2
STEP 4
WRITE 5 AS THIRD DIGIT
FROM END OF MULTIPLICAND.
CONTINUE UNTIL A 4, WITH
NOTHING TO CARRY, APPEARS
IN PRODUCT. MULTIPLICAND
IS THE DESIRED NUMBER
2/48
When Sin Hitotumato translated this chapter into Japanese, he pointed out that Iva's phone number must satisfy
the equation 4 x 105 + x = 4 (lox + 4).This gives x a value of
399984/39 = 10256.
Three
decimal
form
W)
251
252
253
The upper bound of 59 has been lowered by H. L. Nelson to 58, but the largest PPDI is far from known. Recent references include Joseph S. Madachy, "Some
New Narcissistic ~umbeis," Fibonacci Qwzrterly 10
(1972):295-298; Victor G. Feser, "Narcissistic Numbers,"
Pi Mu Epsilon Journal 5(1973):409-414.
111. Dr. Matrix's cell number is 45. When a decimal
point is placed between the digits, it becomes 4.5, the
average of 4 and 5. The answer is unique.
IV. The floor of Dr. Matrix's cell is three by six yards.
The only other rectangle of integral sides, with a perimeter equal to area, is the four by four, but Dr. Matrix specifically stated that the floor was not square.
The problem has historical interest. B. L. van der Waerden, in his beautiful book Science Awakening (Oxford,
1961), quotes the following passage from Plutarch: "The
Pythagoreans also have a horror for the number 17. For 17
lies exactly halfbay between 16, which is a square, and
the number 18, which is the double of a square, these two
being the only two numbers representing areas for which
the perimeter [of the rectangle] equals the area"
The problem yields readily to simple Diophantine analysis. Let x and y be the rectangle's sides. The area, xy,
equals the perimeter, 2x + 2y. When written like this:
254
Five
256
When the end digits of any line of three are added and
the middle digit subtracted, the result is 5.
For more on multiplying magic squares, sometimes
called geometric magic squares, see:
Harry A. Sayles, "Geometric Magic Squares and
Cubes," Monist 23 (1913):631440.
Henry E. Dudeney, Amusements in Mathematics (London: Thomas Nelson, 1917), pp. 124f. (There is a Dover
paperback reprint.)
Walter W. Homer, "Addition-Multiplication Magic
Squares," Scripta Mathematica (Sept. 1952), pp. 300-303.
Boris Kordemsky, "Geometric Magic Squares," Recreational Mathematics Magazine (Feb. 1963), pp. 3-6.
Jack Gilbert, "Minimum Multiplying Magic Squares,"
Mathematics Teacher (May 1960), pp. 325-331.
11. The number 19 can be expressed with four 4's, aided
by arithmetical signs and the decimal point only, as follows:
257
Ruth Ann Schiller, copy editor of theJoumal of Mathematical Physics, was the first to send this attractive
method of expressing 64 with two 4's:
The double factorial sign "!!" is an esoteric but standard
symbol. When 2n is followed by "!!" it expresses the productof2x4x6x
x2n. Thus 41!=2x4=8.
A reader who did not identify himself did it this way:
...
258
260
...
261
ing number 987,654,321 has an analog in all number systems with even bases. In an octal system, for example,
7,654,321- 1,234,567= 6,417,532. In a 12-based system
(letting x = 10, y = 11):
262
Seven
11. The two numbers formed by the ten digits that have
the largest product are 96,420 and 87,531. Among pairs of
numbers that have the same sum the pair with the largest
product is the pair most nearly equal. This rule leads us to
solve the problem by taking the digits in descending
order, starting two numbers with 9 and 8, then annexing
the remaining digits by pairs, the larger of each pair
always joining the smaller of the two numbers: 9 and 8,96
and 87,964 and 875, and so on.
111. The number 8,549,176,320, produced by the indexer named Betty, is simply the ten digits in alphabetical
order. (Note that the letters in BETTY are also alphabetized.)
284
My application of this to Mr. Smith and his health problem first appeared in Ibidem, a Canadian magic journal,
no. 7 (Sept. 1956).
V. Harry Haiard's cryptarithm multiplication problem:
LYNDON
B
JOHNSON
265
266
267
For more on honest foreign numbers see David L. Silverman's "Kickshaws" department in Word Ways 3 (1970):
46-47; Rudolf Ondrejka's letter in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics 4 (1971):151; and Sidney Kravitz,
"The Lucky Languages," ibid. 7 (1974):225-228.
Kravitz points out that 4 is also the limit of a sequence of
words formed by choosing any English number name,
counting its letters, spelling that number, and repeating
the process until it converges on 4. Are there other "lucky
languages" that converge in this way on a single honest
number? Assuming that no number greater than 20 is honest in any language, Kravitz examines seventeen western
languages and reports the results. He found only four
lucky languages. English, Dutch, and German converge on
4, Italian on 3.
Sin Hitotumatu, whose name means "one pine tree" in
Japanese, informed me that if Romanized expressions are
used for the names of numbers 1 through 10, there are no
honest number>. The ten words are: hito (I), huta (2), mi (3),
yo (4), itu (5), mu (6), nanu (7), ya (8) koko (9), and too (10).
In counting, the Japanese usually add tu to each word:
hitotu, hutatu, mittu, 'yottu, and so on. An old Japanese
riddle asks: "Why does too have no tu?" Answer: Its brother
itutu already has two tus.
The Japanese, Hitotumatu wrote, also name the first ten
numbers by a system that comes from China: iti, ni, sun, si,
go, roku, hiti, hati, ku, zyu. Here the numbers 2 and 3 are
both honest. In using this system, the word si is often
replaced by yon to avoid the unhappy fact that si is pronounced like the Japanese word for death. Also, nuna is
often substituted for hiti to avoid confusion with iti. Beyond
ten the Japanese system is s e l d w used, but in this old system, Hitotumatu writes, there is a remarkable honest number tooaramihuta (12).
Nine
269
Ten
ni
272
...
ANSWERS A N D COMMENTARY
273
274
275
Twelve
277
BEHP
YTRO
A1
The Johnson matrix has eight basic solutions. Many
readers sent some of these solutions, with Malcolm C.
Holtje and Dean P. McCullough providing all fifteen. Several readers sent graph techniques for enumerating all solutions to such spelling problems.
11. One method of finding the eight different ways six-
278
219
If reversals are considered different, the formula is simply doubled. It is not hard to prove, Knuth adds, that no
bracelets are symmetrical in the sense that they are identical with their reversals. The only exception is the fourbead doublet bracelet of two colors; in its case the above
formula gives f/z as the number of different bracelets instead of 1, the correct number.
Different methods, including graph techniques, for constructing such bracelets are discussed in chapter 10 of
Sherman K. Stein's Mathematics: The Man-Made Uni-
280
verse, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1969). The chapter is an expansion qf Stein's article
in Scientific American (May 1961). It includes a fascinating history of the problem, beginning with the use of such
chains by poets in India a thousand years ago (as mnemonic devices for remembering combinations of long and
short beats) and ending with current applications, particularly in the construction of what communication theorists
call error-correcting codes. There is a good list of references.
H. M. Schweighofer wrote to describe how these binary
chains are "widely used in remote-control devices such as
the remote tuning of airline and military radios. Instead of
using different beads, of course, the code is formed by
contacting respectively the front (1) or rear (0)rotor blades
of a wafer switch. The control circuit used is a 'reentrant'
circuit whereby a current flows whenever the remotecontrol and motor-driven seeking switches are not in the same
position (same code). The use of wafer switches to create
the code sequences in a manner functionally identical to
your bead bracelets was, in fact, one feature of my first patent.
"Your article brought b a ~ ksome fond memories of the
days I spent, some twenty years ago, designing switching
sequences based on these principles. Now that radio tuning has also gone solid-state there is less need for rotary
switches and such sequential binary codes. Standard binary or BCD codes are used in the new designs. However,
many of your readers have undoubtedly used equipment
operated on the principles of Iva's bead bracelet."
A more esoteric application of bracelet codes is to magic
tricks. For readers interested in mathematical magic, and
with access to the literature, here are a few references.
The first use of the principle seems to be in a trick called
281
Thirteen
283
284
Fourteen
I. The other number smaller than 10,000 that has sixtythree proper divisors (including 1 but not the number itself) is 7,560.
Panos D. Bardis, in "Overpopulation, the Ideal City, and
Plato's Mathematics," Platon 23 (1971):129-131, suggests
that Plato may have chosen the number 5,040 because it is
the factorial of the mystic number 7. When I mentioned
this to Dr. Matrix he immediately replied, "Yes, and if
Plato visited the city its population would become the
square of 71."
11. Here is the only way to arrange two threedigit
square numbers in a two-by-three matrix so that each column, read from the top down, is a two-digit square:
Fifteen
Sixteen
The California school was indeed founded by Dr. Matrix.It flourished until November 1973, when the Amazing
Randi, having enrolled at the school under his real name,
James Zwinge, wrote a detailed expos6 of the school's deceptive practices for the Los Angeles Times. The school
closed shortly thereafter.
As most readers of my column perceived, all but ten of
the items, if instructions are carefully followed, can have
only one result. No one, therefore, can score less than sixteen. Moreover, each of the uncertain tests give the reader
a high probability of hit.
Dr. Matrix was kind enough, on a later occasion, to reveal his sources for all twenty-six items:
1. Martin Gardner, Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diuersions, chapter 2.
2. Invented by magician Frederic DeMuth.
3. A card trick called "Miraskill," devised by Stewart
James.
4. An old "psychological force" that was much used by
the Israeli magician Uri Geller. Uri continued to use it in
spite of its appearance in my 1973 column. Charles Panati,
of Newsweek's science staff, was enormously impressed
when Uri performed this successfully on him during their
288
!2a9
ler. London and Paris are the two cities most often selected. Uri often writes London, crosses it out, then writes
Paris. If Paris is correct he explains that London was his
first impression but he quickly realized it was wrong. If
London is correct he says, "I should have trusted my first
impression, but I was confused when I got a stronger impression of Paris. Did anyone else here think of ParisT"
Several people usually say yes, so Uri wins either way.
17. Based on a trick by British magician Jack Yates.
18. An old favorite of magician Dai Vernon.
19. A trick by Walter B. Gibson, writer and magician.
20. Another psychological force.
21. A card trick by magician Henry Christ.
22. Another psychological number force, usually paired
with item 8.
23. From Victor Eigen.
24. An old psychological force.
25. A trick by Robert Hummer.
26. From Victor Eigen. The probability of getting THE
is 415.
The tricks are excellent stunts for a teacher to show a
mathematics class. Having students explain why the mathematical ones work--often with the aid of simple equations--can be a stimulating classroom project.
Seventeen
291
Hiram Fuller Gutgasz wrote to point out that the solution is unique in a stronger sense than Dr. Matrix realized.
It is unnecessary to restrict the labeling numbers to positive integers no greater than 10. The solution is unique,
when the magic constant is 16, for any set of eight distinct
positive integers. If the labeling is confined to the ten
digits (0 through 9), there are two solutions. Both omit 1
292
293
291
295
Why was Pat included among the hundred? He had invented a device called the "neurophone," said to transmit
electrical pulses, produced by sound, directly to the
body's nervous system and thence to the brain. You can
plug up your ears, place the machine's output "muffs" to
your temples, and hear. No one, not even Pat, says the author, knows why it works, but several companies are "interested." It is suggested that a similar device may be able
to do the same thing with light, thus enabling the blind to
see. No details about this marvelous invention are given,
so it is impossible to know if a new principle is involved
or whether it simply transmits vibrations to the skull,
where they vibrate the inner ear like those patented devices of the nineteenth century for hearing through the
teeth.
There is a photograph of young Pat standing on his
head, and another showing him grinning while two teenage girls listen with neurophone muffs to their temples. A
picture of a more mature Pat appears in Tom Valentine's
paperback, The Great Pyramid (New York: Pinnacle,
1975), and on the dust jacket of the second edition (1975)
of Pat's Pyramid Power. Another good account of Dr. Flanagan's revolutionary research is given in Exploring the
Great Pyramid Shape in America, by Kim Russell, published by Shapeous Researching, Dallas, Tex.
The Parker Publishing Company, West Nyack, New
York, continues to take full-page ads in Fate to sell A1 G.
Manning's book The Miracle of Uniuersal Psychic Power:
How to Pyramid Your Way to Prosperity. This valuable
scientific work costs a mere $7.95. Almost immediately
after using a pyramid, says the ad, "D. J. reports finding
ten crisp $100 bills in her kitchen drawer!" The Pyramid
Think Tank Research Company, in Ingram, Texas, sells a
model that comes with a magnetic compass so you can
align it properly. "Some users report a tremendous in-
296
297
298
Postscript (1985)
High praise for Flanagan's neurophone surfaced in Analog
Science Fiction in two "Alternate View" columns by G . Harry Stine (July 1979 and February 1980). The second column
is about Stine's visit to Flanagan's ranch and laboratory in
Tucson, Arizona, where he tested an improved neurophone.
Convinced that the device is no "humbug," Stine wrote: "I
don't give a doodly-damn what all you bloody experts out
there have presumptuously stated in your outraged fan letters to me." He has put these letters, he adds, in his Utter
Bilge file, the name deriving from a famous statement by Sir
Richard van der Riet Wooley when he became British Astronomer Royal in 1956. "Space travel," declared the astronomer, "is utter bilge."
Anyone interested in the neurophone can write to the
U.S. Patent Office for its two patents: 3,393,279 (July 16,
1968) and 3,647,970 (March 7, 1972). In 1984 Pat was living
at 7 Commercial Blvd., Novato, CA 94947. You can obtain
from him the latest issue of his Flanagan Research Report, a
new book called Pyramid Power 11, and a catalog of his
latest devices for increasing your psychic powers, rejuvenating your sex, and reversing your aging.
Eighteen
I. Alan Wayne's cryptarithm, assuming the usual convention that numbers beginning with 0 are not allowed,
has the unique solution:
300
square in Mrs. White's vision that does not require a hollow. Perhaps the saints were in a trapezoidal formation of
375 ranks, with 197 in the front row, 198 in the next, and
so on to the final row of 571. If Mrs. White viewed this
trapezoid from an elevated position, perspective would
make it appear to her as a perfect solid square.
111. The request for four different positive integers that
can be arranged to make a complex fraction (alb)l(cld)that
equals (dlc)l(bla)was intended as a joke. The two expressions are easily shown to be equivalent when any real
numbers whatever are plugged into the formula.
Many other number jokes are scattered through Dr. Matrix's whimsical commentary. When he mentions, for example, that 491 (the number of the unforgivable sin) is the
difference between the squares of consecutive integers, he
does not tell his readers that any odd number is the difference between the squares of two consecutive integers.
IV. The answer to the first enigma is DAVID; to the second, Lot's wife. The rebus is "No a; h!" or Noah. Dmitri
Borgmann informs me that there are many similar singleletter biblical rebuses: b = "Aha--b!"
(Ahab), m =
"Ha--m!" (Ham), t = "Lo-tl" (Lot), and so on.
Nineteen
302
ANSWERS A N D COMMENTARY
303
304
Numbers (lW)
pages
, 21-22, and Ross Honsberger, Mathematical Gems 11 (1976), Chapter 7.
Some Indian ragas actually do give the impression of a
steadily increasing beat that never gets faster. The precise
techniques for creating this illusion were worked out by Ken
Knowlton, of Bell Labs. The American composer Elliot Carter
used the principle in some of his musical compositions. The
illusion is a rhythmic analog of an endlessly rising tone illusion
discovered by Roger N. Shepard when he worked at Bell Labs.
Shepard's "endless octave," as it has been called, used discrete
notes, but Jean-Claude Risset found a way to do it with a
continuously rising (or falling) glissando.
Graham Holmes, a Clarkson College engineer, wrote to
inform me that if Dr. Matrix were capable of moving one hand
fast enough, and stopping it quickly enough, it would produce
the sound of a clap. This, .in fact, is how the snapping sound of
a whip .is produced.
Quentin G. Furlow called my attention to a remarkable fact
about 5 that occurs in the geometry of higher spaces. A onedimensional "sphere" of unit diameter (it is a straight line
segment) will fit inside a two-dimensional unit "sphere" (circle),
and the unit circle will fit inside a unit ball in 3-space. The ball
will go inside a unit hypersphere in 4-space, and this in turn fits
into a 5-space unit hypersphere. But at this point an incredible
turn occurs. The 6-space hypersphere, and all hyperspheres of
higher order, will each go into the 5-space sphere! In other
words, the 5-space ball is, in a sense, the largest possible unit
hypersphere.
Readers familiar with Transcendental Meditation (TM), est,
and Scientology will recognize many word plays on terms
related to the three cults. My Bagel Lox of Dr. Pepper is a play
on Donald Cox, a former vice-president of Coca Cola who
'became president of est. The Nonestic Ocean is the ocean
Dorothy and her yellow hen cross on a raft in Ozma of Oz.
Dr. Matrix's procedure of starting with two numbers a and b,
305
.. .
306
Twenty
308
Die 2
Die 3
In commenting on problem 3, Uzi Ritte, an Israeli geneticist, informed me that if the Hebrew names for numbers 1
309
through 999 are alphabetized, the first item is the Hebrew word
for 1, and the last is the Hebrew word for 999.
David Emmanuel wrote to contest Dr. Matrix's claim that
numerological theorems are as numerous as the primes. They
are more numerous, he argued. The primes are only countably
infinite (they can be put into one-to-one correspondence with
the counting numbers) whereas numerological theorems are
surely as uncountably infinite as real numbers.
The following articles, in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics, deal with primes that have their digits in ascending or
descending cyclic order:
"A Consecutive-Digit Prime," Joseph Madachy, Vol. 4, April
1971, page 100.
"Consecutive-Digit Primes - Again," Joseph Madachy, Vol.
5, October 1972, pages 253-54.
"Consecutive-Digit Primes (Round 3)," Raphael Finkelstein
and Judy Leybourne, Vol. 6, Summer 1973, pages 204-06.
"Consecutive-Digit Primes (Finale)," Ray P. Steiner (formerly
Raphael Finkelstein), Vol. 10, No. 1, 1977-78, pages 30-31.
In March 1978 I published the remarkable discovery of Alan
Cassel that the sequence 123456789, repeated seven times and
followed by 1234567, is a pseudo prime with odds of about a
trillion to one that it is a genuine prime. In December of the
same year I was able to report that physicist R. E. Crandall and
computer scientist Michael A. Penk proved that the 70-digit
number is indeed prime. It is the largest such prime known.
Harry Nelson, in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics
(Vol. 10, No. 1, 1977-78, page 33), raised an interesting question
about the number formed by writing the counting numbers in
sequence, 123456789101112131415 . . . . Taken as a decimal frao
tion, the number is known to be transcendental. If truncated at
some spot, is the number ever prime? Nelson tested it through
248 decimals without finding a prime. He conjectures that the
question is undecidable.
Similar questions can, of course, be raised about the primality
310
311
312
"Did you return any of the fees you collected from the clients
to whom you sold your prediction? I asked.
Dr. Matrix looked dumbfounded. "Certainly not! They paid
for a prediction. They got a genuine one. You can no more
blame me for the happy outcome than you can blame Jonah
for his failed prophecy after Jehovah changed his mind about
destroying Nineveh."
If any readers think the use of cockroaches to predict
earthquakes is ridiculous, let me recommend the chapter on
earthquake prediction in Jeffrey Goodman's book We are the
Earthquake Generation: When and Where the Catastrophes Will
Strike (Seaview Books, 1978). Dr. Goodman is best known as a
psychic archeologist who uses psi powers for making archeological finds. "Someday a cockroach may save your life," he
writes. He concedes that the little creatures may be responding
to tiny tremors of some sort that precede a quake, but he thinks
"ESP, rather than some physical sense, may be the most fruitful
area of research on this topic." Here is his conclusion:
It is in precognition . . . that animals appear to be genuinely
gifted. This is precisely where we need assistance in earthquake research. . . . Ironically, the investigation of the ability
of animals to sense earthquakes, now scientifically in vogue,
seems to bring us back full circle to psychics, and their ESP
ability to predict quakes.
For Helmut Schmidt's classic study of cockroach PK, see his
"PK Experiments with Animals as Subjects," in the J o u m l of
Parapsychology, Vol. 34, 1970, and articles by Schmidt and
others in later issues. Louisa E. Rhine has an unintentionally
hilarious section on Schmidt's cockroach experiments in her
book Psi, What Is It? (Harper & Row, 1975), Chapter 17.
The most important tests of animal PK, subsequent to
Schmidt's, were done in Rhine's laboratory by his director
Walter J. Levy (on whose name I play in my column). As
313
Twenty-one
ASS\\.ERS A S D CO\l\lESTARY
315
316
Figure 44. How the order3 magic square generates 381 654 729
He said that this is one of the rules for identifying social security numbers, citing references which I was not able to check.
Leuze sent a thorough analysis of the problem in negative
bases. For other generalizations, see "Progressively Divisible
Numbers," by Stewart Metchette, in Journal of Recreational
Mathematics, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1982-83), pages 119-22. The
problem surfaced again in "What's In a Number?", Mathematical Gazette, Vol. 67 (December 1983), pages 281-282.
The editor added in a footnote that when the problem
appeared in London's Sunday Times in 1982, irate readers
made the same careless mistake some of my readers did they complained that the answer was not unique because
they had worked on the problem with an eight-digit calculator!
Jaime Poniachik (the person who posed the problem in
my column) told me the problem had been invented by his
wife, Lea Gorodisky, who worked with him on the Snark.
This magazine no longer exists, having been followed by the
puzzle magazine Juegos. Poniachik is an editor. It is a
delightful magazine, with very funny cartoons that often
relate to games and recreational mathematics.
317
9. AZCl
10. B1-C3
11. C3A4
12. A3C2
13. C4-A3
14. A3-B1
15. CZA3
16. A3C4
Alan Delahoy was the first of many readers who sent proofs
that 16 moves are minimal for the knight-switch problem. Some
of these proofs began by transforming the problem to a 12point graph in the manner given in my book Aha! Insight
(1977). When the problem is in this form, it is easy to show that
a solution must have an even number of moves that cannot be
less than 14. (If the board has only three knights at one end,
seven moves are needed to get them from one end to the
other.) All that remains, then, is to show that 14 moves are too
few. The insight that reduces 18 moves to 16 is the realization
that back-tracking one knight-returning it to a cell from which
it had moved-clears the way for another knight move. All
16-move solutions have this feature.
Howard Rumsey, Jr., proved on a home computer that any
distribution of the six knights can be reached from the starting
pattern in 22 moves or fewer. Any knight pattern can be
reached from any other pattern in no more than 25 moves.
Rumsey found seven pairs of such patterns (not counting
symmetries) for which 25 moves are required to go from one
distribution of knights to the other.
James G. Mauldon suggested replacing the middle knight on
each side with a king that moves like a knight, and adding the
requirement that the kings change places. He found a %-move
solution. If knights are placed on the two central squares to
make four knights of the same color on each side, the knights
of different colors can be switched in 12 moves. Mauldon also
If we add the provisos that the black and white knights must
alternate moves, as in chess, and that no two knights of opposite
color may attack each other, we have the form of the problem
given by Henry Ernest Dudeney in The Canterbury Puzzles
(1907), Problem 94. He gives the best solution 22 moves.
Twenty-two
The four prices Iva paid for the trinkets at the Great
Bazaar are $1, $1.50, $2, and $2.25. Both the sum and the
product of this set are $6.75. If it had not been specified that
Iva paid $1 for the earrings, there would have been a second
solution to the problem: $1.20, $1.25, $1.80, and $2.50. The
problem, posed by Kenneth M. Wilke (in Crux Mathematicorurn, Vol. 4, June 1978), is a variant of one devised by
David A. Grossman that appears as No. 65 in L. A. Graham's
Zngeniotcs Mathematical Problems and Methods (Dover Publications, 1959). In Grossman's version both the sum and the
product are $7.11, and the unique set of prices is $1.20,
$1.25, $1.50 and $3.16.
The simplest way to dissect a cube into three congruent
solids is to slice it into three parallel slabs. When I gave this
absurd answer, I foolishly said I knew of no other way to
accomplish such a trisection. As many readers were quick to
tell me, I could not have been more wrong.
John E. Morse sent the most general solution. If you hold
a cube so one comer points toward you and the outline
appears to be a regular hexagon, you will see the cube's 3symmetry. This symmetry makes it possible to slice the cube
into three congruent
in an infinite number of ways.
The surfaces of the parts may be flat or curved in any
manner, and it is easy to design weird trisections for which
320
321
322
tion of the ten digits will have a sum of 45, or a digital root of 9.
This means it will be a multiple of 9, and therefore composite.
The highest no-rep emirp is 987653201.
I asked if there is a cyclic emirp with more than seven digits.
Joseph Buhler has shown that there is no such emirp with eight,
nine, or ten digits. Thus aside from the trivial two-digit cyclic
emirps, the only known cyclic emirp is the six-digit 193939. It
may be difficult to prove there are no larger ones.
Dr. Matrix mentioned the unsolved problem of determining
the last prime on an alphabetical listing of the English names of
primes. (See "Alphabetizing the Integers," by Edward R. Wolpow, in Word Ways, Vol. 13, February 1980.) Donald E. Knuth,
the noted computer scientist at Stanford University, gave the
task to his students in a programming seminar. More than half a
dozen students independently found the answer: two vigintillion two undecillion two trillion two thousand two hundred
ninety-three.
A number of readers caught the joke in Dr. Matrix's remark
that 19 is an unusual prime because 19 is the sum of 9 and 10,
and also the difference between the squares of 9 and 10. Euery
odd number can be partitioned into two consecutive integers
that add to the number, and have the same number as the
difference between their squares.
Dr. Khalifa is no joke. He is a devout Muslim, passionately
convinced that the Koran is the inspired word of Allah. When
he wrote to me in 1980 he was senior chemist in the State
Chemist's Office' of Arizona, in Mesa. After graduating at Ain
Shams University in Cairo, he obtained a master's in chemistry
at the University of Arizona, and in 1964 received his doctorate
at the University of California, Riverside. He has published
some two dozen scientific papers.
The pamphlet Dr. Matrix showed me was out of print in
1980. It contained, Khalifa said, only a fraction of the marvelous
numerological discoveries he has made. He sent me an unpublished paper titled "The Existence of God: Finally, Scientific
3U
3. AAccordi~~g
to tlie Oxford E11glis11Dictio~~ar>a i ~ ~ a ~ ~ lisa "a
l u rnel111,er
k
of
thc militar>-bod!; originall!- co~nposcdof C;aucasian slavcs. x\-hich scizccl
the throne ol'Egvpt in 1254, and contirlued to Ibrm the ruling class in that
coilntry until the early part of the 19th centul-y."
4. Skibouk: I assumc this is a claggcn
5. "Gocl is great."
A. The Kalm~lckswere Asiatic Bliddhistr xrho settled in the lo~verT'olga hasin
of Russia. Thc Kalmuck rcgion of thc USSR T\-as clissolvccl hccausc of
Kallnuck collaboration ~viththe German invaders of IVorld Il'ar 11, hilt
reestablished in 1958.
326
Science
Thc: Sac:rt .. .Ic:c:tIc: is a .lively anrl luc:itl selec:tion of writings about st:ienc:e. From
D;ir\vin on evolution to Carl Sagan on the universe. here a r e morc? than 30 essiiys,
c:ovc!ring suc:h tli\.erse i ~ n df<sc:inating su2)jec:ts a s the L ~ ! i ~ t ~ I iwoman.
ft~l
science and
literalurt!. logic:. the sea, itntl the moon.
These thought-provoking pieces ;Ire \voven togetht!r by iln entertaining t ~ n d
extensive c:ommentitry b y hiliirtin Gardner. author i ~ n dmathemalic:ii~n.His explanatory a n d biographic:al sket(:ht!s make Thc! Strc:rc:cl H(:~:tl(:not only il rich c:ollection of
good reading I)ut iin informi~lhistory of the men and ideas thiit have moved our
c:ulture and moltletl our everyday lives. Contributors inc:lucle: C i ~ r Sagan.
l
Stephen jiiy
Gtrultl. Isa;~c:Asimov. Lewis Thomas. T. H. Huxley. H. C;. Wells. J. Robert Oppeniant int
427 pages
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