Suddenly the number 23 seems to be everywhere. I have previously commented on its appearance in the works of Donne & Ha-Joon Chang.
On Thursday the radio preview for Radio 3’s Night Waves promised a discussion of 'Four Horsemen which features the views of twenty three thinkers on the world in crisis'. I haven’t had chance to listen to it, but reviews of the film suggest that ‘The simple premise of this film is the that capitalism has not failed.’ Perhaps 23 because it is a direct response to Ha-Joon Chang’s scepticism about western capitalism?
And I have just been reading Nature's imagination: the frontiers of scientific vision which reminded me that the problems which Hilbert posed as a challenge to mathematicians in 1900 also numbered 23.
But I now read that Hilbert posed only ten of them to that famous conference, & that he actually had a 24th which was omitted from his final list.
So probably all just a coincidence, nothing to be read into it at all.
Must be all this millennial doom & gloom – the Eleventh Hour is upon us.
