A hundred is ten squared and reduces to one, and it serves throughout scripture and culture as the round number of fullness and long life. Abraham was a hundred years old when Isaac was born, so the number marks the completion of the long wait for the promised son. The parable of the sower speaks of seed that yields a hundredfold, the image of complete abundance. The Greeks offered a hecatomb, literally a hundred oxen, as the great sacrifice, and Latin gives the century, the hundred, as the unit of the fullest count. In Hebrew the letter qof carries the value one hundred.
In chemistry, a hundred is the atomic number of fermium, named after Enrico Fermi and first identified in the debris of the Ivy Mike hydrogen bomb test of 1952, a discovery kept classified for several years afterward.
The whole apparatus of digit-reduction numerology is a twentieth-century invention rather than an inheritance from antiquity. Mrs. L. Dow Balliett published the first systematic version, The Philosophy of Numbers, in 1908, fixing the letter-to-number chart still used today and ruling that eleven and twenty-two must stand as master numbers rather than reduce further; her colleague, the physician Julia Seton, is credited with coining the word numerology itself around 1912.