Seventy-three is prime and reduces to ten and then one. In Jewish gematria it is the value of chokhmah, wisdom, chet, kaf, mem, he, totalling eight, twenty, forty and five, and Chokhmah is the second sefirah on the Tree of Life, the flash of insight from which all else unfolds. Seventy-three also has a celebrated arithmetical link to scripture: it is the mirror of thirty-seven, and the two multiply to two thousand seven hundred and one, the gematria of the opening verse of Genesis, a coincidence long treasured by those who read the Torah numerically.
In chemistry, seventy-three is the atomic number of tantalum, named after Tantalus of Greek myth, condemned to stand forever in water he could never drink, a fitting name for a metal whose oxide resisted dissolving in acid however it was treated. Anders Gustaf Ekeberg discovered it in 1802.
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.