2024

I have a thing for num­bers. In case you did­n’t know. 😉

It’s actu­al­ly sort of a prob­lem, because every­thing seems to express itself to me in num­bers. The date, the vol­ume of my music, the tasks on my list for today are all num­bers to me. I love how we can express these sim­ple truths as num­bers and engage with them like old friends. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this works both ways. There are num­bers that are not friends, but fiends. 

Zero is the most obvi­ous fiend on my list. It’s the undo­er. The num­ber that tries hard to imi­tate 1 and be in all, but fails. Aside from the nefar­i­ous zero though, there’s an entire group of num­bers on my “we are not friends” list. Tru­ly, it’s a shame. It’s my bias. It’s con­tra­dic­to­ry. This is what I mean: prime num­bers. The first and seem­ing­ly most impor­tant group of num­bers in the world of arith­metic suf­fer from my dis­like. I am hon­est­ly worked up about this. I want to like them, but I just can’t. I know that every oth­er num­ber in the world is com­posed of these essen­tial num­bers and with­out them, we would­n’t have won­der­ful amaz­ing num­bers like 144. But I just can’t bring myself to like num­bers like… 23. 

It is for this main rea­son that I am super excit­ed to wel­come in the year of 2024! Although the full num­ber of 2023 is NOT prime (can you cal­cu­late its prime fac­tor­iza­tion?), the sim­pler short­er method of writ­ing 2023 as sim­ply the num­ber 23 is phys­i­cal­ly painful for me. 23 is a ter­ri­ble num­ber. It is not my friend. It is not the num­ber’s fault. Poor vic­tim of prime­ness that it is. How­ev­er this does not change the fact that I earnest­ly wel­come the year 2024, also known as the beau­ti­ful num­ber 24, and invite you to cel­e­brate with me this most won­der­ful year of our Lord 2024!