Modern numerology reduces fifty-seven to three and reads it, like all numbers resolving to three, as a figure of expression, creativity and sociability, the three approached through a five of change and a seven of enquiry. This reductive reading is the only symbolic account the number attracts, and it applies a standard set of digit-meanings rather than anything specific to fifty-seven. The candid description is a number famous for a marketing slogan and otherwise without lore.
The digit seven within fifty-seven carries a genuinely mixed reputation in Chinese tradition: it is sometimes read as auspicious, its sound associated with togetherness, but the seventh lunar month is also Ghost Month, Gui Yue, when the gates of the underworld are traditionally held to open, a folk-religious association that makes seven, unlike the consistently favoured six, eight and nine, a digit Chinese numerology treats with genuine ambivalence rather than settled preference. Fifty-seven has a small place in mathematical folklore as the Grothendieck prime: an anecdote holds that the eminent mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, asked to name a specific prime, offered fifty-seven, which is not in fact prime, being three times nineteen, a story mathematicians still tell as an example of how abstract genius and concrete arithmetic do not always keep company.