Many of us have our lucky numbers. Then there’s Pomona College, where a veritable cult has developed around the uncanny incidence of the number 47, with believers -- some with tongue planted more firmly in cheek than others -- suggesting that the number holds a place of cosmic significance.
“Forty-seven is dogma ... a legend of mythical proportions,” says a 20-year-old student handbook. Since the mid-1960s, when the college’s fixation began, Pomona students and alumni and others who caught the craze have hunted for occurrences of the number -- and have found them, they say, at an astounding rate.
To reach Pomona College, take Exit 47 off Interstate 10. The college’s Mudd-Blaisdell Hall, completed in 1947, has 47 letters on its dedication plaque and 47 balusters on its staircase. And how many pipes run across the Lyman Hall organ’s top row? Uh, 47.
“Everyone here keeps an eye out for 47,” says Mark G. Wood, a college spokesman.
The mania began in the summer of 1964 when a group of “cream of the crop” freshmen attending an intensive math-and-science program became convinced that the number 47 occurred at a supernatural frequency, says Donald L. Bentley, a professor emeritus of mathematics and an instructor in the now-defunct program.
Mr. Bentley taught the students statistics. “I would often pull a number out of my head to use as an example,” he says. “I tended to use 47,” a prime number that pops up in multiple mathematical sequences.
That summer three students embarked on a furious counting spree on the campus, tallying up everything they could find: letters on signs, baubles on chandeliers, eucalyptus trees. There were sets of 47 everywhere, they found, more so than any other number they tried. When Mr. Bentley presented the students with a geometric proof that any two numbers are equal -- a teaching tool, he says, whose fallacy can be found only by using advanced math -- they wrote a corollary that any number is equal to the mystical 47.
The students collected photographs, receipts, anything bearing the number 47, and kept scrapbooks that are still maintained by Pomona’s math department. The chemistry department subsequently “picked up on the 47 business,” says the statistician, and many people on the campus “just got hooked.” They even noticed 47s beyond Pomona: The Bible credits Jesus with 47 miracles, for example, and, according to an advertisement, Rolaids consumes 47 times its weight in excess stomach acid.
In the early 70s, fans of the number 29 formed a “rebel group,” says Mr. Bentley, but “it never got very far.”
Forty-seven, however, boldly went where no number had gone before. A 1979 graduate of the college, Joe Menosky, wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation and two subsequent series, inserting fleeting 47s into dozens of episodes and generating much attention among Trekkies. One fan Web site notes “an abnormally high use of the number 47,” which it calls a “conspiracy ... manipulated by an obscure organization called Pomona College.”
The television show Alias, which reportedly also employs a Pomona graduate as a writer, continually uses 47 -- in room numbers, identification numbers, and dollar amounts. On the big screen, the character played by Richard Chamberlain (Class of 56), is 47th in a line of people waiting to be saved in The Towering Inferno. And in The Absent-Minded Professor, the final score of the zany basketball game (filmed in Pomona’s old gym) is 47-46.
The tradition now includes a 47 Society, whose members report sightings of their favorite number. “A couple of people have taken it what I would call a little bit too seriously,” says Eric A. Levine, an alum who started the society in 1992.
“The bottom line is it’s amusing,” he says. “When we see patterns, as people we tend to look for meaning in them.”
Laurens Mets, one of the original 1964 counters, who is now an associate professor of molecular genetics and cell biology at the University of Chicago, says that 47’s “ardent adherents” have become, recursively, the phenomenon itself.
Says Mr. Bentley: “A lot of it is what we call biased sampling. We’re looking for it, and so we see it. Nobody has ever done a valid experiment to confirm that 47 occurs more often than it should.” Suddenly he stops himself, not wanting to engage in “heretical” discussion. “I shouldn’t be saying those things about 47.”
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http://chronicle.com Section: Short Subjects Volume 51, Issue 23, Page A6
