This page isn’t about what believers in the occult call numerology, which doesn’t interest me.  But Martin Gardner has written a series of short pieces about the fictional Dr. Irving Joshua Matrix, who promotes among other things a unique brand of “numerology” based on interesting numerical and lexical coincidences and recreational mathematics.  The articles (stories? essays? they’re hard to classify, being a genre unto themselves) are collected in his book, The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix.  One more, written subsequently, appears in Gardner’s Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers.

After reading the Dr. Matrix stories, I felt inspired to try to find similar interesting coincidences.  Eventually I put together a story, “Numerology for the New Millennium,” which I submitted to GAMES magazine, where it has been printed in the November 1999 issue.  The story included the following revelations.

Numerology allows us to conclude, with better than 95% confidence, that a Republican will be elected president in the year 2000.  This startling result is obtained from looking at several earlier presidents:

Since the GOP was founded in 1854, during the administration of the 14th president (Franklin Pierce), every prime-numbered president has been a Republican.  The chance of this occurring at random is quite small.  (Can you calculate it?  “Numerology in the New Millennium” explains how.)  Plainly occult forces are at work, forces which will also install a Republican as the 43rd president, the successor of Bill Clinton.

The case of Florence Griffith Joyner, the Olympic athlete known as “Flo-Jo,” also suggests the occult power of numerical relationships over human life.  Flo-Jo lived from 12-31-1959 to 9-21-1998, when she died at the age of only 38.  She won five Olympic medals in her life, four of them at the Seoul, Korea Olympics.  The number five thus had many significances in Ms. Joyner’s life:  the five letters in her nickname, in “Seoul” and “Korea”, her five Olympic medals, and the five rings of the Olympic symbol.  The following (approximate) equation thus embodies numbers of importance to Flo-Jo.  Check it on your calculator, and remember that e is the fifth letter of the alphabet ...

e^38/5 = 1998.1959

Questions, corrections, comments:  Send me e-mail at  markthom@flash.net