Alex's Adventures in Numberland - Alex Bellos [31]
Birth dates are an obvious source of numbers from which to derive character traits. So are names, since words can be broken down into letters each assigned a number value. ‘Puff Daddy was about to go to jail,’ he said. ‘Puff Daddy had bad relationships. I changed his name to P. Diddy. Then when he wanted to settle down, I changed his name to – Diddy. These were my suggestions and he took them. Jay-Z wanted to marry Beyoncé. I told him he needs to go back to his original name. He went back to Shawn Carter.’
I asked Jerome if he had any recommendations for me.
‘What’s your full name?’ he said.
‘Alexander Bellos, but everyone calls me Alex.’
‘What a bummer.’ He paused for dramatic effect.
‘Is Alexander better?’ I asked.
He boomed: ‘Let us just say that one of the greatest men that walked this Earth was not called Alex the Great.
‘I’m just telling you. I have talked to people named Alex before. Just on a simple basis: the first letter of the name is very important. “A’ is 1. You’ve already got that with Alex. But with Alexander you end with an “r”. “R” equals 9. So the first and the last letters of your name are 1 and 9. Alpha and omega. The beginning and ending. Now let’s take the first and the last letter of Alex. Just the sound of “x”.’ He pronounced it ‘ekkss’ with a grimace that looked like he was about to vomit. ‘Do you want to use that? I wouldn’t. I would never go by Alex.
‘God said a good name is rather to be chosen than riches of gold! He didn’t say a nickname is rather to be chosen!’
‘Alex is not a nickname,’ I protested. ‘It’s an abbreviation.’
‘Why are you fighting it, Alexander?’
Jerome then asked for my pad and scribbled out the following table:
This, he explained, showed which numbers corresponded to which letters. He took his fingers to the first column: ‘Letters that equal one are A, J, S. Allah, Jehovah, Jesus, Saviour, Salvation. Two is the number of diplomats, ambassadors. Two gives good advice, two you love, you’re a team player, that’s B, K and T, that’s why if you go to a Burger King you can have it your way. Number three controls radio, TV, entertainment and numerology. C, L, U. Of course, you go into radio and television, you don’t have a clue.’ He gave me an ironic wink. ‘But if you learn numerology, it will open you up to the clue of life. Number four: D, M, V. How many wheels on a car? Where do you get the licence? The Department of Motor Vehicles. Five is halfway between 1 and 10: E, N and W. Five is the number of change. If you scramble the letters you get ‘new’. Six is the number of Venus, love, family, community. When you see a beautiful woman, what do you see? A FOX. Seven is the number of spirituality. Jesus was born on the twenty-fifth, 2 and 5 equals 7. Eight is the number of business, finance, commerce, money. Where do you keep the money? In the headquarters. Nine is the only one that has two letters. I and R. You ever talked to a Jamaican? Everythg is irie, man.’
On conclusion he put down his pen and looked me full in the face: ‘This,’ he said, ‘is Jerome Carter’s method of the Pythagorean system.’
Pythagoras is the most famous name in mathematics, entirely due to his theorem about triangles. (More about that later.) He is credited with other contributions, though, such as the discovery of ‘square numbers’. Imagine, as was common practice, counting with pebbles. (The Latin for pebble is calculus, which explains the origin of the word ‘calculate’.) When you make a square array in which pebbles are placed equally apart in rows and columns, a two-row/ column square requires four pebbles, and a three-row/column square requires nine. In other words, multiplying the number n by itself is equivalent to working out the number of pebbles in a square array with n rows and columns. The idea is so instinctive that the term