Numerology
The belief that numbers, and numbers made from letters, carry hidden meaning about people and events.
Also: gematria, isopsephy, Pythagorean numbers, life path number
Numerology looks for meaning in numbers. Its oldest relatives are gematria in Hebrew and isopsephy in Greek, where each letter has a numeric value, so every word has a sum. The Pythagorean school in ancient Greece held that number underlies the order of the cosmos, and later writers claimed Pythagoras as the founder of the art. The popular modern system, which reduces a name and birth date to a single digit, grew in the United States in the early 1900s. Many cultures also hold particular numbers lucky or unlucky, such as the 8 in Chinese-speaking regions and the 13 in the West. Mathematicians point out that with enough sums, matches can always be found.