Pay please! The 23: Also not illuminated an exciting number

Today’s issue about numbers and their different meanings is not for heise readers who suffer from duotriophobia. That’s the fear of the number 23. Its opposite is duo-triomania, the compulsive idea of ​​looking for a 23 in everything given. For example in Shakespeare, allegedly born and died on April 23rd. He was 46 (23+23) years old when the King James Bible came out. Psalm 46 counted “shake” as the 46th word from the beginning and counted 46 words from the end “spear”. That can not be a coincidence!

From a mathematical point of view, 23 is also a very interesting number: It is the first prime number in which both digits are prime numbers. It is the smallest prime number that can be represented as the sum of consecutive prime numbers (5+7+11). 23 is the smallest solitary prime number and a sluggish one at that Eisenstein prime and a factorial prime. She belongs to the class of happy numbers and is one Woodall number and a Sophie Germain Prime. The 23 is the smallest prime number that is not the sum of two Ulam numbers can be displayed. In the mathematical problem of the Chinese remainder theorem, 23 is the smallest positive solution.

23 unsolved math problems in 1900

On the edge of mathematics: When Euclid of Alexandria wrote down the basic concepts of geometry in his “Elements”, he came up with 23. And when David Hilbert described the unsolved mathematical problems of his time in a famous speech in 1900, it was exactly 23. Very useful for Scrabble: A structure with 23 sides is called Icosakaitrigon.

It becomes confusing when you get involved with the way conspiracy theorists think. What the number 23 meant for the Illuminati and subsequently for the hacker Karl Koch was already explained in Numbers, Please! explained. A slightly different direction Discordianismholding up 23, the number representation of the Discordian goddess Eris, a splinter called action 23 even includes it in its name.

Many conspiracy theories are Durotriomanic and convert dates to 23 in many ways. So one comes whole lot together. The best-known example is certainly September 11, 2001, the date of the terrorist attacks in the USA. If you add the numbers of the date, you get 23. That’s proof enough for many “truthers”.

Soccer player influences elementary school students’ favorite number

Occasionally there are misunderstandings about the 23. So the “Spiegel” reported about one Survey at Hamburg elementary schools, after which 23 was the respondents’ favorite number. The explanation: at the time of the survey, that was the jersey number of soccer player Rafael van der Vaart, who was playing for HSV at the time. It is similarly prosaic with the first Learjet, the Learjet23. Here the 23 does not refer to a version of the aviator, but to Part 23 of the US Federal Aviation Administration’s rules, which imposed a weight limit for small business jets.

The case of the Viennese music magazine 23, which dealt with atonal music from 1932 to 1937, is somewhat more complicated. 23 referred to paragraph 23 of the Austrian press law, which one had to invoke if one wanted to force the correction of incorrect information in a newspaper article. But 23 is also the central “fate number” of the composer Alban Berg, who was temporarily the editor of the magazine.

Mountain finished important compositions and always wrote important letters on the 23rd of the month. His “Lyric Suite for String Quartet” contains numerous allusions to the 23rd When Berg received a telegram from his fellow musician Arnold Schönberg, he took the telegram address “Berlin Suedende 46” (23+23) as a good omen. Berg died on the night of December 23-24, 1935.

Doomsday canceled on December 23, 2012

Another December 23rd was to be a fateful day: the Mayan calendar ended on December 23rd, 2012, which gave some end-time experts the idea of ​​announcing the end of the world. But life went on, as a song says, just like on October 19, 1533, which the mathematician and theologian Michael Stifel had calculated as the date of the end of the world.

As is well known, we live in the year 2023. That is even for the serious daily newspaper extremely suspicious. She points out that for this year the equation 2023=(2+0+2+3)×(2²+0²+2²+3²)² applies and the next date of this kind will not be due for 377 years.

The date interpretation of the newspaper as an indication of the difference between the 20 pfennigs for a local call in the telephone booth and 23 pfennigs for a call from the domestic telephone is original. That was sometime in the distant past, when the phones were black or gray and the cells were yellow.

Incidentally, yesterday was January 23rd, another date that is charged: 100 years ago the Prussian Minister of Culture approved the Establishment of an institute for social research at the University of Frankfurt, which later became world famous as the “Frankfurt School”. On January 23, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke completed his last major work in German, the “Sonnets to Orpheus”.

You could call that a coincidence, but the date can be found under the entry “The 23 Riddle” in the “Lexicon of Conspiracy Theories” by Robert Anton Wilson, the author of “Illuminatus”. So there must be something to it. “A conspiracy is the collaboration of several people with a common purpose and the deliberate exclusion of outside or public insight, thereby concealing their purpose and identity.” No, that’s not in Wilson’s dictionary, that’s the definition of the Federal Intelligence Service. After all, he has to know.

(mawi)