In mid-September a mathematician was writing about his favourite formula whilst I was reading about the very same thing buried deep in holy writ!

A multitude of times I’ve noticed crazy coincidences cropping up to give confirmation and more instruction upon certain topics, as though the Lord’s got His hammer and hitting me between the eyes to get my attention!  This ‘God-incident‘ is the most extraordinary so far coming almost ‘simultaneously’ from both a secular, scientific standpoint and two fundamental scriptures.

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An anniversary-cum-birthday holiday brought me opportunity to read a book at long last after a non-stop busy Summer.  So I grabbed a couple from my pile, one of which, Unlocking the Sign Miracles of John by Jonathan R Hill, seemed on the lines of what I’d heard John Kilpatrick saying about the ‘sign miracles’ in the Gospel of John.

Flicking through it I noticed many references to the ‘Consummation of the Age’ (including chapter on its ‘mathematical foundation’), the ‘end-time’ prophetical significance of those miracles, as well as typologies, numerical aspects of Hebrew and Greek alphabets and calculations of time periods. Now, I take the last with a pinch of salt as they need careful checking, but am willing to consider and weigh new, even radical, concepts that don’t contradict scripture.

The book is based upon the work of Arthur Ware in The Restored Vision and quotes from Dr Grattan Guinness’ Light For The Last Days (an author used in The Invisible Hand, so influential upon me, as in my “Welcome”). I’m aware of the ancient practice of substituting letters of original Hebrew and Greek alphabets with their ordinal (sequential) value and standard designated values known as gematria, which Hill uses. His book is annotated with cross-references throughout.

Without further ado, here are some introductory points and copies of a few specific pages to read carefully (enlarge for ease of reading):

‘But God does not stop with types, as each letter of the two original languages of the Bible, Hebrew for the Old Testament and Greek for the New Testament, encapsulates a numerical value. Words and collections of sequential words have a mathematical identity which,  therefore, extends the surface narrative. Any agreement between this underlying numerical pattern and the surface meaning or doctrine, affixes considerable authenticity to the text…Only a personable supernatural God could inject such intrinsic connectivity within a book written in two languages with different alphabets, by multiple authors and across two millennia‘ (emphasis mine).

‘The only reference in the (NT) to individual letters is actually in John’s Gospel – ‘And the Jews marveled, saying, “How does this man know letters, having never studied?” John 7:15 NKJV (page 20).

‘The existence of a relationship between the surface meaning of the text, the type and the underlying mathematical value has long been known in Jewish Rabbinic tradition’ – see Wiki Pardes (Jewish Exegesis) (page 160).

Page 38: ‘…Before returning to the details of the progression of seven days, one more scientific digression is to be considered. A simple ratio of letters to words in Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1 yields the following fundamental mathematical constants seen in figure 4’ – continues below (NB: especially note first footnote):

Mathematician Joseph’s Jaw-dropping Email

Upon returning home on the closing days of September and opening the accumulation of email, I soon read a notification of new post sent the preceding weekend from Joseph at Rationalising the Universe, the early part of which reads:

‘Today I write a short post about something close to my own heart; and to so many others in the field of mathematics which is the notion of mathematical beauty. That is, deriving aesthetic satisfaction from mathematical work (which in my opinion is on a level far above any painting, sculpture or photograph can ever achieve). There is no one defined notion of mathematical beauty; as with the more regular notion of of human beauty there often is a general consensus but it is down to personal taste. Here I summarise some areas in which mathematics in my eyes is at its most beautiful.

‘In this area I take a commonly cited example of Euler’s formula, which was showered with praise by the late great Richard Feynman, who used to refer to the formula as “our jewel”. Let me first present the general version of the formula…’

(He explains formula linking trigonometrical with the exponential form and when ‘x’ takes the value of ‘pi’ it becomes the Euler’s identity, as in Hill’s book above):

‘That is incredibly powerful mathematics summarised in a short, elegant looking formula which revels so much. To me this is incredibly beautiful…’

I was left utterly ‘God-smacked’!  My next post reveals what I found when opening the full post from Joseph.

More of this book has yet to be checked but I offer this account for your information and to the credit of Jonathan Hill and his sources for their immense labour, for which I am indeed grateful.

Notes:

1. The theorem uses the five most important constants of mathematics: zero (0), unity (1), ‘e’, the exponential number describing growth and decay ‘e’, ‘pi’ the ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference, ‘i’ the basic imaginary number which, if it did exist, equals the square root of -1.
2. Euler’s identity won a reader’s contest in Mathematical Intelligencer magazine in 2004 by a considerable margin for “the most beautiful theorem in mathematics”.
3. Items 1 & 2: Mathematics – an Illustrated History of Numbers, ed Tom Jackson.
4. For more about this special formula see Wikipedia Euler’s Identity.