STILL WITH THE 11 PHENOMENON

            I was flipping through some articles recently when some numbers and statistics caught my eye. I am constantly amazed by the synchronicity of numbers and their relationship to other numbers and to human lives as well.

            It is not difficult to become immersed in stats and numbers, for me anyway, but perhaps it has become more so since I have been experiencing the 11 Phenomenon over the last couple of years, or more. Naysayers are telling me that I’m looking for the number everywhere while others are telling me that they too are finding 11’s all over the place.

            I will not go into a lot of detail on the 11 Phenomenon but, believe it or not, the number 11 has significant meaning to me other than seeing it on the digital readouts on clocks more regularly than is mathematically feasible. I see the number 11, or quite often multiples of it like 22 or 33 on till receipts, license plates, odometers, digital signs and the list goes on and on. If you would like more details you can Google or Wikipedia it, but, trust me, it is real and it has been happening to me for so long that I don’t look for it at all…it just appears. I wrote about this in the 211^th Humble Opinion editorial in March of 2014.

Now, I am going to pass on some more number facts in the hope that you, Dear Reader, will find them as interesting as I do. Here goes:

The numerical digits we use today such as 1, 2 and 3 are based on the Hindu-Arabic numeral system developed over 1000 years ago.

            11111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321

            It is believed that William Shakespeare was 46 around the time that the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first word is shake and the 46th word from the last word is spear. Hmmmm.

            In a room of just 23 people there is a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday.

            Zero is the only number that can’t be represented in Roman numerals.

            The most popular favourite number is 7. Nearly 3000 people, around 10% of the total asked, chose 7 as their favourite number in an online poll by Alex Bellos. The second most popular was 3.

            Seven also shows up a lot in human culture. We have seven deadly sins, seven wonders of the world as well as colours of the rainbow, pillars of wisdom, seas, dwarves, days in the week…It is speculated that this might be because when these things came about there were celestial bodies visible in the sky: the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

What comes after a million, billion and trillion? A quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion and undecillion.

Speaking of numbers, in 2016 there are a number of milestone events within our large extended family. There are a few 40^th birthdays, a 45^th birthday, a few 60^th, a 35^th and a 40^th wedding anniversary, an 80^th birthday and those are just a few off the top of my head. There might be more if I was to take the record books out for a closer look. It’s a banner year and it looks like we are going to have a fair number of events to attend.

“Without mathematics, there's nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.”- Shakuntala Devi (1929-2013).