Not surprisingly, many people become convinced that these coincidences have irrational explanations. What, for example, should be made of the following similarities not all of them numerological between U. Find listings of daytime and primetime ABC TV shows, movies and specials. Get links to your favorite show pages. S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, taken from a far more extensive list in Martin Gardners The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix 1. 98. 5Lincoln was elected president in 1. Kennedy in 1. 96. Both were assassinated on a Friday. Lincoln was killed in Fords Theatre Kennedy was killed riding in a Lincoln convertible made by the Ford Motor Company. Both were succeeded by Southern Democrats named Johnson. Andrew Johnson was born in 1. Lyndon Johnson in 1. The first name of Lincolns private secretary was John, the last name of Kennedys private secretary was Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth was born in 1. Lee Harvey Oswald in 1. Booth shot Lincoln in a theatre and fled to a warehouse Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theatre. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald both have 1. The first public suggestion that Lincoln should run for president proposed that his running mate should be John Kennedy. John Pendleton Kennedy was a Maryland politician. Shift each letter of FBI forward by six letters in the alphabet and you get LHO, the initials of Lee Harvey Oswald. Test Your Knowledge. Computers and Operating Systems. One explanation for coincidences of this kind is selective reporting. Anything that fits is kept anything that does not is discarded. Thus, the coincidence of day of the week for the assassinations is emphasized the differences in month and number of day in the month are ignored. Lincoln was assassinated on April 1. Kennedy on November 2. More subtly, only one choice is made from many possibilities, the one that maintains the numerological pattern. Sometimes the date of birth is used, sometimes the date of election. If those do not work, how about the dates of college graduation, marriage, firstborn child, first election to office, or death Moreover, some facts turn out to be false. The correct birth date for Booth is now thought to be 1. Booth actually fled to a barn. It is common for coincidences to be exaggerated in this manner. And once one starts lookingLincoln had a beard. Did Kennedy No, he was clean shaven. Do not mention beards, then. Many of the coincidences listed here are exaggerations, lies, elaborations chosen from an infinite range of potential targets, or the result of a hidden selective process. Still, a few of the coincidences are quite startling. Although rational explanations exist, a true believer cannot be convinced. It is in this fertile territory that number mysticism thrives. Arithmomancy. Arithmomancy, also called arithmancy, from the Greek arithmos number and manteia divination, was practiced by the ancient Greeks, Chaldeans, and Hebrews its successor is numerology. In these forms of number mysticism the letters of an alphabet are assigned numbers by some rule, typically A 1, B 2, Z 2. Words become numbers when their letter values are added together. Peoples names, in particular, convert into numbers that are considered to have special significance. Thus, Ian Stewart, the name of the author of this article, becomes 9 1 1. The significance is clear the year of his birth, 1. Battle of Waterloo. Since 1. 30 1. 0 1. The best known instance of numerology is the number of the beast, 6. Revelation to John 1. Curiously, Revelation is the 6. Bible, and the number of the beast occurs in verse 1. But who is the beast Carlyle Hynes, a Seventh day Adventist, added up the Roman numerals in the phrase Vicarius Filii Dei Vicar of the Son of God, a title falsely ascribed to the Pope and omitted all the other letters that is, I 1, V 5, L 5. C 1. 00, D 5. Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand, the same method applied to the name Ellen Gould White, the founder of Seventh day Adventism, also yields 6. Quick Free Download Adobe Photoshop Cs3 on this page. W counts as two Vs. Hitler sums to 6. A 1. 00, B 1. Two 1. Michael Stifel and Peter Bungus. Stifel decoded 6. Pope Leo X, Bungus as Martin Luther. Not coincidentally, Stifel was a Protestant theologian and Bungus a Catholic. Britannica Lists Quizzes. The name Jesus in Greek has the numerological value 8. Many people have discerned numerical patterns in the Bible. For example, consider the King James Version. The phrase Old Testament consists of two words, one with three letters, the other with nine. Concatenate the two digits to get 3. Old Testament books. New also has three letters, and 3 9 2. New Testament books. Methuselah is said to have lived 9. This number is a palindrome, meaning that it looks the same when reversed. It is also the 1. Does 1. 7 have any other significance Well, the 1. According to John 2. And so on. The Bible contains so many numbers that such games can be played indefinitely the question is what conclusions if any should be drawn from them. Pythagoreanism. The earliest known systematic cult based on the rule of numbers was that of the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras was a Greek who thrived in the 6th century bce. Little is known of his life, and in fact he may be a composite figure to whom the discoveries of many different people have been attributed by his followers. It is not even known whether the Pythagorean theorem in geometry was actually discovered by him. The Pythagoreans invested specific numbers with mystical properties.