Number Familiarity

Are you familiar with the number seven? Of course you are, you probably knew what seven was before you began kindergarten or pre k. But are you really, really, really, really familiar with the number seven? The answer is probably not.

I have a new hypothesis that it takes many years of experience to truly understand all of the implications of even the simplest numbers. For example, I have a tendency to notice things in sets of four. My book "The Theory of Primes" is about the four-part sequence by which all of reality operates. In previous blogs, I noticed that there are four types of worker; those who make things, those who fix things, those who move things and, those who run things.

Sure enough, the number four has always been significant to me. When I was growing up, there were four people in our family and when I became a Christian, the Bible revolved around the four gospels. On a deep level, this has conditioned me to notice things in fours. There may possibly be other discoveries that I have missed because it would have required "thinking" in terms of some other number with which my familiarity is not as deep.

Numbers like one and two become deeply familiar to anyone and also commonly used numbers like ten and twelve but the rest do not. Maybe this is why so many geniuses have an underlying background in mathematics, even in subjects that have little to do with science. It provides a wider familiarity span with numbers.

It may be that any "discovery" that can be made has certain "prominent numbers" that it revolves around and having a wider "number familiarity span" makes one more likely to make the discovery. For example, I notice that two of the greatest military geniuses who ever lived, Alexander and Napoleon were both highly proficient with mathematics as schoolboys.