My Fascination With Numbers

Introduction

Writers write because they want to create art that they can share with others, but we also like our art to be seen, acknowledged and enjoyed by others, and part of what shows us the success of what we have created is the number of people who have read or commented on our creations.

Vocal provides us with that information as do the various Facebook Vocal groups that we are members of.

That has become a sort of jumping-off point for this article which is about my own personal fascination with numbers. Though I will take things from the internet to illustrate things, this is not definitive or really technical, just my own thoughts and observations.

The video I have included is a fascinating talk from Adam Spencer on his love of "Monster Numbers".

Falling Into The Numerical Maelstrom

If we go back to my writing, the numbers I have on Vocal are now unbelievably high and it would be crass to share them publicly but feel free to message me. I have shared them in the past and at the end of this are some Vocal stories that I published to mark the various milestones. I am not sure if I will do another explicit one.

My Seven Days In blog recently had its millionth visit, but that took almost twenty years and has generated very little return. The blog has had about twenty comments and has six followers, hardly a towering success.

My YouTube Channel is reasonably successful, but not enough to make money. More than 50% of the visits have come from the slideshow below.

I have five books self-published on Amazon and between them, they have sold 99 copies, so again not the greatest of success but this is just to show that I illustrate this by using numbers.

That's Enough About Me

Then there is π , I recently wrote a short critique about the film here:

π as a simple fraction requires three numbers 22 divided by 7. It is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, approximately equal to 3.14159, but decimalisation of the number creates a never-ending decimal.

Its decimal representation never ends, nor enters a permanently repeating pattern. It is a transcendental number, meaning that it cannot be a solution of an equation involving only sums, products, powers, and integers.

It is a number that continually fascinates me just because it's decimalisation is effectively infinite. The page below apparently shows the first million digits of π on one page.

I wonder how many lines in this article reference numbers, and that in itself would require us to use numbers.

Other numbers we use are dates and times and I measure the number of steps I take on my phone. Basically for everyone numbers are ubiquitous.

The representations we use are Arabi, there is a little about it on Wikipedia, and I do find it amusic that some people see this as Islamic indoctrination, I we mean we've only been using them for a couple of thousand years.

We do use Roman numerals as well for some notation, and everyone knows "X" means ten, but here is your guide if you wish to know more.

Conclusion And My Vocal Milestones

I do believe that I will always be fascinated by numbers. We use them in so many things that we do and they are almost always there somewhere in our daily lives.

I will leave with a list of my Vocal milestones and a few other significant number posts so you can see where I was and how I came to be where I am now on Vocal. I don't expect you to read these unless something catches your eye but you can see how numbers do affect my writing and creativity.

And finally those who have really enabled me to do all this