What is the connection between basketball superstar Michael Jordan, Beat Era novelist William Burroughs, comedian Harpo Marx and mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr.? But even Dr. Beitman, because it seems, has a 23 connection. Beitman defined in an e mail. What’s the symbolic number of death? Burroughs passed alongside his fascination with 23 to his good friend Robert Anton Wilson, and it figures prominently in the Illuminatus! There’s even a Facebook page for “23rdians,” as people who find themselves fascinated with the number name themselves. Or possibly it is more. It may all be mere happenstance. Is All of it Just Coincidence? Did It Start With William Burroughs? Dr. Beitman notes that it is attainable for two things to be meaningfully related with out a typical trigger. And as Daniel Gilbert explains in this 2010 New York Instances article, there are plenty of different seemingly magic numbers. And then there’s Michael Jordan, who started carrying the number 23 in high school as a result of it was as shut as he could get to half of the number 45 worn by his older brother, Larry. It’s arduous to say, although 3.29 percent of annually’s days has 23 in the date, so there’s lots of opportunity for births, deaths, accidents and other memorable events to happen on those days. All of us people have 23 pairs of chromosomes in our genetic makeup. It’s crammed with posts containing the number, starting from an image of a restaurant test number 23 that was issued to table 23, to the music video for the 2013 hip-hop tune “23” by Mike WiLL Made-It. But they weren’t the only ones with a 23 fixation. So what’s this all actually mean? Some coincidences, in any case, can be meaningful. Wilson wrote with Robert Shea. LeBron James additionally has worn 23 as an homage to Jordan. If you happen to poke around the internet, you’ll uncover thousands of web pages dedicated to something called the “23 Enigma” – primarily, a belief that the number has some type of magical or mystical significance and/or power, because of all the instances in which it happens. The Nobel Prize-profitable mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., whose battle to beat psychological sickness is documented in Sylvia Nasar’s 2001 biography “A phenomenal Thoughts,” as soon as advised a student at Massachusetts Institute of Expertise that 23 was his favourite prime quantity, and insisted that he had appeared on the cowl of Life magazine, disguised as Pope John XXIII. Later that day, his ship sank, killing him. And the medieval Catholic military order, the Knights Templar, had 23 grand masters throughout its existence. In the Bible, Numbers 23:23 accommodates the phrase “What hath God wrought,” which happens to be the first message sent in code on the telegraph by Samuel Morse back in 1843. In case you add up the 4 digits of 1967, the 12 months that Nirvana co-founder Kurt Cobain was born, they come to 23 – which is also the sum of the four digits for 1994, the year wherein he died. How did this all get began? However that’s not all. Nash, oddly, died in a car accident on Might 23, 2015, in keeping with his profile on the Nobel web site. That night, Burroughs supposedly heard a radio information story about a flight 23 that had crashed in Florida, additionally piloted by a captain Clark. Nevertheless, “relating to numbers like 23, I do not know,” he mentioned. The 23 Enigma even was the subject of a 2007 movie, “The Number 23,” wherein a troubled man named Walter Sparrow, portrayed by Jim Carrey, becomes obsessed with a ebook – entitled, fittingly, “The Quantity 23: A Novel of Obsession” – and is satisfied that it contains the key to his personal previous. A skeptic would possibly ascribe all this to mere probability, however some folks assume there’s extra to it. In keeping with Barnaby Rogerson’s 2013 compendium “Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers – from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World,” the 23 obsession began with Burroughs, well-known for his unusual flights of disturbing, hallucinogenic fantasy in novels akin to “Bare Lunch.” In Tangier in 1960, Burroughs claimed to have met a sea captain named Clark, who boasted that he’d never had an accident in 23 years.