4 is the magic number cont’d [spoilers]
yesterday, i made it my bidness to clue you into 4 and why it’s the magic number. today i will tell you why. i will also discuss at length my unabatable zeal for charting the mathematics behind its magic—in a crowded jumbo jet, sipping on campari & o.j., whizzing through the air at an altitude of 39,000 feet, and watching a brendan fraser movie where he can communicate with raccoons.
the solution is frustrating at first but very gratifying once you yourself get to make someone else figure out how every number leads back to 4 just as every road leads to rome. i played a little trick on you yesterday by not writing out the numbers (despite what the chicago manual of style says). if i had, you might have realised that each number is the amount of letters it contains. thus: 3 (three) is 5 (five) is 4 (four). doh! 4 is magic therefore because it has the unique property of being spelled with its own amount of letters.
for every number to be reducible to 4 however, there needs to be additional magic—all numbers have to lead to it, and no other number can be “magic”. if 5 were spelled with two letters, 5 would be 2, 2 would be 3, and 3 would be 5 again— creating an infinite loop that never gets to 4. additionally, only one number can be spelled with its own amount of letters. if 6 were spelled “sihcks”, then the whole delicate balance explodes and the puzzle loses its appeal.
these are the things that were whirling around my brain as woodland creatures were flinging rotten fruit at brendan fraser’s gonads. and as the captain made an announcement in three languages, i realised that 4 is only magic in the english numberverse, who knows what mysteries were yet to be uncovered in foreign alphabets. perhaps 9 was magic in mandarin, maybe 13 in romanian. or maybe—and this is what really revved my turbines: maybe english was the only language which held these three magic properties. maybe english and its numbers are the center of the matho-linguistic universe!
i did some quick counting in different languages and soon realised that cinco was cinco and vier was vier. but did all numbers in spanish lead to cinco? were there other numbers in german that were magic? i mapped out a few languages in my counterfeit moleskine journal.
spanish, it seems, is magic only half the time. 50% of the numbers 1-100 will get stuck in a 6-4 infinite loop. german, like its grandnephew english, has 4 as a magic number (and only 4). what about french? french, like france itself, gets tangled in a vast web of bureaucracy. 6 leads to 3, 3 leads to 5, 5 to 4 and back to 6 and so on and so on to infinity. just by sketching out these four languages, i could see how each chart structure was wildly different than the last. i needed more! i became a data junkie!
i made fast friends with the vietnamese government official sitting next to me. “can you spell out the numbers 1-100 in vietnamese,” i asked over another round of campari & o.j.?”
“huh?!?” he said (the question mark-exclamation point-question mark i added)
but weirdly, he wrote them down without further questioning. “do you know any other languages?” i asked. perhaps he anticipated what i was going to ask him to do and responded in the negative. so i set about the plane querying people on what languages that they knew and then prodding them to write out every number in that language from 1-100. it was actually a pretty good icebreaker and people were oddly compliant. perhaps everyone was bored with watching brendan fraser tongue kiss brooke shields, or perhaps people were just excited to showcase their language. for whatever reason, i soon had myself a dozen cocktail napkins with over 1,000 handwritten numbers scrawled all over them.
as i always do when overwhelmed with a sudden influx of correlatable data, i got out my laptop, closed my redtube.com tab, and opened up my charting program so i could chart the tar out of these numbers and their relationships.
the images above are from this feverish, 39,000 foot high charting session. you will notice how the structure of numbers and how they are spelled in each language is as different as the languages themselves. and yet similar languages do have similar structures. the longest number in portuguese, spanish, and italian is 54, yet italian has a magic number, spanish is half magic and portuguese is only a quarter magic.
consider also vietnamese in which half of all numbers are ten letters long. in malay, not a single number is spelled with 6 letters. in polish, it takes 24 letters to spell out the number 99. in typical german efficiency, it takes just four maximum steps to arrive at the magic number while it takes 7 steps in italian. these are just a few of the highlights, the rest i leave in your intrepid hands.
in the end: english’s four, german’s vier, and italian’s tre were the only fully magic numbers in my pool of 10 languages but that does not take away from the other languages and the beauty of their relationships in this odd intersection of number and letter and language and math.
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props to my fellow passengers on thai air who answered my out-of-nowhere request for written numbers (and now know why i was badgering them): mr. binh, hugh, almas, weronika, jordan, that guy with the jason mraz hat who was reading the entertainment section of usa today, and phillip—you guys, please consider yourself members of the mile high club for polyglots.
disclaimer: i couldn’t read everybody’s handwriting, and don’t know every language (yet), so there will doubtlessly be some mistakes in these charts—perhaps even some large and embarrassing ones.
![bond villain or master linguist?
the duck face may have replaced the sneer as the ultimate facial expression in formal portraiture, but this still doesn’t really clue us into whether or not this disgusted genius and his evil lap cat are planning to hold the world hostage for one hundred billion dollars or thinking about how to make sense of the odd little glyphs found inscribed in mayan stonework. so i will just tell you.
yuri knorozov is the russian ethnographer and linguist who first deciphered maya script. here’s how it all began »
At the closing stages of the war in May 1945, Knorozov and his unit supported the push of the Red Army vanguard into Berlin. It was here…[that] Knorozov came across the National Library while it was ablaze. Somehow Knorozov managed to retrieve from the burning library a book, which remarkably enough turned out to be a rare edition containing reproductions of the three Maya codices which were then known…Knorozov is said to have taken this book back with him to Moscow at the end of the war, where its examination would form the basis for his later pioneering research into the Maya script.
there are many bamfs in linguistics but for my one hundred billion dollars, knorozov is the bamfiest bamf of them all.](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lrf5os96XC1qzrip0o1_r1_500.png)
