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A Composite Without Lore

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A Composite Without Lore

Seventy-four is twice thirty-seven and reduces to eleven and then two. It is one of the integers in the seventies that the symbolic traditions did not develop, and the honest treatment is to report that it carries no significant religious content. What can be said of it is structural only, twice a prime, and so on, which is not lore.

Seventy-four factors as 2 x 37 and carries 4 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 40, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.

The digit four inside it is the one Chinese numerology treats with real weight: si, four, is a near-homophone of si, death, in Mandarin and in several other varieties of Chinese, which makes four the single most avoided digit in addresses, floor numbers and phone numbers across much of East Asia, a fear with its own name, tetraphobia, and no connection to any Western number symbolism.

The genuine Pythagorean number philosophy that this modern chart borrows its name from left no writings of its own: Pythagoras and his early followers taught only by mouth, and what survives of their number theory comes instead through Nicomachus of Gerasa, whose Introduction to Arithmetic of the first century CE became the standard authority for a thousand years, and through Iamblichus, who drew on Nicomachus two centuries later; neither wrote anything resembling a name-and-birthdate numerology.

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