LIVING IN IOWA: Knowledge, wisdom and useless statistics: numbers appear to add up to something
July 07, 2009 · Dan Brawner

On the front page of a paper this week, there was a story in which Cornell College mathematics professor Jim Freeman announced that 7/8/09 at the time of 12:34:56 would mark a once-in-a-century event, since the time and date would run 1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9. Dr. Freeman wasn't proposing that this had any Pythagorean numerological significance. But this revelation comes like a little shot of adrenaline. What does it all mean? Should I have stocked the basement with cans of beans and Spaghetti-O's? Should I have given away my worldly possessions and repented for my sins?

And speaking of Revelations, the book of the Bible is boiling with mysterious numbers and symbols. Who are the four horsemen of the Apocalypse? What is the importance of the number 666? Using integer arithmetic, if you divide 2,000 by 3, you get 666. Some thought this meant the world would end on Jan. 1, 2000. It didn't. (But T.V. did get a lot worse.) Did some folks really imagine God would be compelled to schedule His to-do list by the Gregorian calendar?

It is argued that the Mayan calendar predicts the world will end on Dec. 23, 2012. The 16th Century French apothecary Nostradamus also calculated that date to mark the end of everything.

Pythagoras, the Sixth Century mathematician and philosopher, did not calculate the end of the world, but he did propose that numbers represent the way Nature itself works and if you can understand mathematics, you've pretty much figured out everything.

So impressed were Pythagoreans with the spiritual significance of numbers that they swore, not by the gods but by tetractys, special equilateral triangles. St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.) agreed with the Pythagoreans, that "numbers are the universal language offered by the deity to humans as confirmation of the truth."

For the media, there is nothing so forceful, definitive and deserving of our solemn respect as statistics. They act as if polling can predict presidential elections, sun spots and the date of the first frost of the year. I once cornered a statistician and demanded, "Can a poll of 300 people accurately predict anything?" To which he nodded sagely and replied, "Of course, but you have to have the right 300 people."

But not everybody has shown such reverence for numbers. 19th Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli wrote, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

They may not ultimately always mean much, but numbers and patterns are interesting to our monkey brains. Whenever we discover something, we expect it to unlock the secrets of the universe. So when we contemplate that Wednesday's numbers lined up in order for the only time this century, it may not reveal the cure for cancer. But it might make us smile.