In anticipation of Jim Carrey’s Oscar winning role in the movie The Number 23. What are the true characteristics, both numerologic and mathematic, of the number 23? Does it have a peculiar mathematical significance?
In the religion of Discordianism, it’s a holy number. I wouldn’t be surprised if the screenwriter knew this. It’s pretty much the first thing I thought when I heard of it.
Jim Carrey’s making the publicity rounds. The other night on a talk show, he made his entrance to “Strawberry Letter 23” and made to a point to mention it, calling it a Brothers Johnson song. The Brothers had a huge hit in 1977 with their cover version (IMHO better than the original), but the song is Shuggie Otis’, from 1971.
“23” may well be Jim Carrey’s command of pop-culture trivia, rated on a scale from 1 to 100. :dubious:
Given the enormous number of numbers in everyday life, and given any possible way of combining them, you can find huge numbers of meanings in any number you choose.
People have found hundreds of instances of 42 being a significant number, all because of its use in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Martin Gardner’s Dr. Matrix books are full of numerological arguments, correspondences, and trivia such as these and so is his Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.
Bottom line: there are no true numerological characteristics of 23 and it has no greater mathematical significance than any other number. Everything else is something that the gullible will read into it.
Why, that sounds rather final. Perhaps a different angle, is the number 23 a prime number? What are its divisors and “supplicants”?
It’s one of the special numbers on “Lost”. Interesting to ads for the movie during the show (I dodn’t know if there is any connection)
Brian
IIRC, there was something in the trailer about how 2/3=.666… so, you know, evil and all that. Aside from Carrey’s surprisingly ripped bod, yawn. Looks about as compelling as The Astronaut Farmer. And who the hell decided to call it The Number 23 rather than simply (and less-laughably) ‘23’?
Every number is special!
http://www.stetson.edu/~efriedma/numbers.html
If you can’t figure that out yourself, perhaps numerology is not the field for you. 
[sub](Yes, 23 is prime.)[/sub]
Now that you mention it, though, his torso is most impressive. Perhaps 1/23 is his new-'n-improved body fat percentage.
Here’s a few fanciful "23"s, some of which may yet turn out to be true:
The percentage of the film’s total domestic box office tallied in its first week (before negative world-of-mouth kills it).
The number of ads, in-theater messages and concessions ads, and trailers that you have to sit through before the movie starts… also, the number of minutes it takes.
How many bucks it costs for a pair of matinee tickets, two small soft drinks, and a large popcorn.
The number of films Carrey’s made up to and including this one. (Not really, but if you exclude the ones where he only did voice work or had a cameo, it’s pretty close.)
The number of screenwriters to work on this project.
The number of points Carrey and the credited screenwriter are awarded, cumulatively. Guess which one gets twenty points and which, three.
The number of viral marketing firms or consultants who have approached the studio, offering to help turn “23” into a cult movie phenomenon.
The number of ASCAP-licensed songs used in the movie.
The age difference, in years, between Carrey and the actress who plays his love interest. (This one’s almost on the nose; Carrey’s 45 and there’s a young actress in it, who doesn’t play his wife but who may very well be a love interest anyway, who IRL is 20 1/2 now.)
The percentage of viewers who are left wondering what the heck it was they’d just watched…
What’s a supplicant in this context?
And do you really not know whether 23 is prime or not?
-FrL-
Oh, I freely admit that I am quite ignorant and deficient in mathematics. Numbers always lost meaning in the greater arts. I have always only had a left brained relationship with them numinous.
Congrats on 2.5k posts!
23 was always my student number in elementray school.
Prime means you can’t make a rectangle out of it.
23 is a big number to do this with, but if you can, or if you can somehow imagine it, try to arrange 23 squares into a rectangle. (With all the squares perfectly aligned with each other, of course.) You’ll find you can’t do it–there will always be extra squares left over or else you will need more squares to fill in the rectangle.
So, for example, I can make a rectangle out of 6 squares:
(where each * stands for a square.)
But I can’t do so with seven squares:
or
or
or whatever. Try as I might, it never comes out to a rectangle. So six is not prime, but seven is
What about 23? Try as I might:
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
*
**
**
and so on… it turns out never to make a perfect rectangle.
Well, maybe you already knew all that.
-FrL-
My previous post has caused me to wonder:
Does anyone know if there is a kind of property of numbers which has to do with how far away they are from the nearest multiples of other numbers, and which said property is also interesting?
I ask because I was wondering if there would be a pattern to the sizes of the “gaps” in the last rows of my illustrations above given a series of “attempted factorizations” of a number (so to speak) or if the sizes of the gap are in some way “random” in a way related to the “randomness” of the primes.
There is probably some really easy answer to this question, but I haven’t thought it through.
-FrL-
Hey, 23x1 is a perfect rectangle. What are you, some kinda skinny-rectangle bigot?
23 also correlates nicely with 17
Yes, sort of, in this instance. I think the non-mathematical will think of a line intuitively as “not a rectangle” so I leave that out, in order to not complicate things.
Whatcha mean?
-FrL-
It wasn’t the shoes; it was the number 23.
It was my birthday. I was 44.
-FrL-
Oops wrong number sorry