SCHEHERAZADE NUMBERS
In Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetics, there is a section titled “Numerology,” serving as a strange appendix to the compendium of his knowledge and beliefs. In this section of the book, he preserved several of his more unusual speculations about humanity’s past. He was fascinated by the possibility of lost mathematics: ways ancient peoples could achieve extraordinary feats of navigation and engineering, especially in matters of seafaring, through occulted methods of calculation and arithmetic.
One such system considered was what he called “Scheherazade Numbers,“ in honor of One Thousand and One Nights. This concept was largely built from multiplicative operations surrounding the number 1001, itself the product of the primes 7, 11, and 13. From there, he noted that the products or powers of 1001 and other primes are particularly simple to memorize due to large amounts of repetition and palindromic behavior. 1001 multiplied by the primes preceding its trio of factors, and the next prime, 17, comes out to 510,510. 1001’s 19th power is 1,010,045,120,210,252,210,120,045,010,001, echoing itself just enough times that while too large to fully comprehend, can still be easily memorized.
From this and many other patterns, Fuller proposed that persistent superstition surrounding these particular three primes: 7, 11, and 13, were due to their ability to allow very large calculations to be performed rapidly by a talented yet largely obscure priest class. These individuals would have memorized many of these numbers, and thus quickly performed extraordinary calculations at once by remembering the results of dividing by other primes. The ability to do this would allow extremely large-scale endeavors of mapmaking and navigation in a manner that would never need to be written down, and thus, could be kept as secret knowledge. Such skills would have been invaluable until more widespread literacy and education rendered these hypothetical arts obsolete.
Of course, such a narrative is unfalsifiable. What is left purposefully unrecorded cannot truly be proven to have ever existed, however correct the mathematics or ingenious the hypothesis. Let us, nevertheless, indulge Fuller's vision, that there really is a secret priest class of ancient mathematicians still operating in modernity, however scattered and few, ever chanting the old numbers. Perhaps it was a secret passed on to them while loading oil tankers in Basra, or Singapore, or even Corpus Christi. Perhaps they know the names of a hundred generations of silent scholarship, preserving each other’s memory between sequences of numerals that flow from their tongues like spells.
Perhaps someone might read this echo, as you do now, and feel the urge to self-initiate. They might even be the first to ever do so. They’ll begin whispering the sequences to themselves until they repeat in the mind throughout their day involuntarily, a comforting hymn that transcends any need for historicity. Numbers, after all, are indifferent to our stories.