Word play

Word Ways, Nov, 2007 by Martin Gardner

This is an excerpt from Mr. Gardner's forthcoming book on wordplay. It will be Chapter 7 in that book entitled "Entangled Words and Numbers".

Alphamagic Squares

Surely the most fantastic 3 x 3 magic square ever discovered is one constructed by Lee Sallows, a British electronics engineer who works for the University of Nijmegen in Holland:

5    22   18
28   15    2
12   8    25

It would be hard to guess its amazing property. For each cell, count the number of letters in the English word for its number, then place these counting numbers in the corresponding cell of another 3 x 3 matrix. For example, "five" has four letters, so 4 goes into the top left corner of the new matrix. Here is the result:

4    9    8
11   7    3
6    5    10

Not only is it another magic square, but its integers are in consecutive order! Sallows calls the first square the li shu (li for his first name Lee), and the second square its alphamagic partner. His computer investigations of alphamagic squares in more than twenty languages are reported in his two-part article "Alphamagic Squares" in Abacus (Vol. 4, 1986, pp. 28-45, and 1987, pp. 20-29, 43).

Physicist friend Mamikon Mnatsakanian noticed a further coincidence. The two magic consonants, forty-five and twenty-one each spell with nine letters, the number of cells in each square.

Decode a Number

The first ten letters of the alphabet, ABCDEFGHIJ, code the name of a number less than 100. Each letter standards for a different digit. What's the number?

Eighty-four

The 46th Psalm and Shakespeare

It has long been noticed that the 46th word of the 46th Psalm is shake, and the 46th word from the end is spear! Moreover, Shakespeare was 46 when the King James translation was published in England in 1611. There is more! The 14th word is will, the 32nd word from the end (the final Selah is not counted) is am, preceded by I. The sum of 14 and 32 is 46!

Alas, these are all amazing coincidences. J. Karl Franson, writing in Word Ways (August 1994) revealed that in an earlier English translation of the Bible, by Richard Taverner, all the numerology given above was there! The Taverner translation was in 1559, 25 years before Shakespeare was born. The coincidences are more astonishing when one learns that the wording of Psalm 46 is not the same in the two translations!

Allan Slaight, writing on "The Bard and the Bible" in Puzzler's Tribute (A.K. Peters, 2001), edited by David Wolfe and Tom Rodgers, reports still another coincidence. If numbers are assigned to Shakespeare according to the following scheme:

1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10
S    H    A    K    E    S    P    E    A    R
E

the numbers add to 46.

The Urantia Cult

My book The Great Urantia Mystery (Prometheus, 1995) is about a strange religious movement founded by the American psychiatrist William S. Sadler. The cult is based on a massive "Bible" called The Urantia Book (UB). The book claims to have been channeled by a sleeping man in contact with higher beings from other planets. The name of the mysterious channeler has never been revealed. In my book I argue that he was Wilfred Custer Kellogg, like Dr. Sadler, a former Seventh-day Adventist. He was married to the sister of Dr. Sadler's wife.

On page 1234 (note the 1234) of the UB, three numbers are assigned to the sleeping contact person: 3-17-126-4-384-6-37, 182314, and 3641852. Note that there are seven numbers in the first sequence, six digits in the second, and seven digits in the third. There are seven letters in Wilfred, six in Custer, and seven in Kellogg. It is hard to believe this a coincidence. Is there some way to decode the three sequences to get the accrual names of the sleeper?

In my book I make an effort to find such correlations, but none are entirely satisfactory. Since the book was published I have found a better correlation for the second sequence. Consider the name CHRIST JESUS. The first letter is C, we move 2 steps to arrive at R, 3 more steps to T, 4 steps to U, 1 step to S, then back to the beginning for 8 steps to E. The letters obtained in this way, 123418 are the six letters of CUSTER.

This still seems too contrived. If any reader can find better correlations I would be grateful to receive the results.

Mrs. White and 666

For many decades Seventh-day Adventist leaders proclaimed that the Roman Catholic Church is the Antichrist. They proved this by a curious technique. They added the Roman numerals in VICARIUS FILII, one of the Pope's titles, to obtain 666, the number of the Beast in Revelation 13:18. W is taken as double U, and U was written as V by the Romans:

V -   5
I -   1
C - 100
A -
R -
I -   1
U -   5
S -

F -
I -   1
L -  50
I -   1
I -   1

D - 500
E -
I -  1

666

To the great embarrassment of the Adventist church, someone discovered that precisely the same technique applied to the full name of Ellen Gould White, the prophetess and cofounder of the Adventist movement! Here's how it's done:

E -
L -  50
L -  50
E -
N -

G -
O -
U -   5
L -  50
D - 500

W -  10
H -
I -   1
T -
E -

666