Saturday, March 14, 2015

pi

THIS OLD PI (Pi day song - sing to the tune of "Knick Knack Patty Wack")

Number pi
Number pi
It's irrational and so am I
With a 3.1415926
Pi Day is for lunatics!

Number pi
Sing out strong
Fifty billion digits long
And there's still no evidence of any rule
Transcendentalness is cool.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

707

Here is a picture of a section of the book of Esther from a scroll 120 years old.  It is the section listing the 10 sons of Haman who were hanged.  All scrolls of the Book of Esther are written this way.


If you look closely, you will see that in the second name the tauf  ת is smaller than the other letters. In the eighth name, the shin שׁ is smaller, and in the tenth name the zayin ז is smaller.

The numerical values of tauf, shin, and zayin are, respectively, 400, 300, and 7, which total 707.  (There is no letter with a value of 700.  400 is the highest they go.)  Jewish years, when written in Hebrew omit the millennium.   So they years 707, 1707, 2707, 3707, 4707, and 5707 were all written as tauf shin zayin  תשׁז   . (The order is switched because Hebrew goes from right to left.)

On October 14, 1946, 10 Nazi criminals were hanged after the Nuremberg Trials.This was in the Jewish year 5707.  Julius Streicher, on his way to the gallows, yelled out "Purim fest 1946!"

Coincidence or prediction?  No one knows any other reason that these letters to be written smaller than the others.  It has just been done that way for the past two millenia.

A few other details:

(1)  The vav ו in the last name is written larger than the other letters.  Why?  The vav has a numerical value of 6.  Could it be that this is to tell us that the other letters refer to the 6th time the year is written with the other letters (since it is in the 6th millennium)?  Or maybe it is unrelated, and was done that way because the letter vav looks like a gallows.

(2)  According to the Talmud, Haman had a daughter.  She committed suicide before her brothers were hanged.  In 1946, Hermann Goring was also supposed to have been hanged, but he committed suicide the night before.  There are rumors that he was a cross-dresser.