Ask people their favorite number and you might get a wild variety of answers—on the PopMech web team there's 4, 2, 36, and 5040, the anti-prime. But if you ask enough people, you start to see which numbers emerge as consensus favorites across the population.
Math blogger Alex Bellos recently did this, and after polling more than 44,000 people from around the world on his website, he got an answer: The world's favorite number is 7.
No surprise there. We call it lucky 7, after all, and it's not like the slot machines in Las Vegas are dotted with 9s. "People's strongest emotional reaction is to the number 7, and this has been true throughout history," Bellow told Nautilus, though he admitted nobody knew exactly why that was. Days of the week, perhaps? Or maybe people just love primes.
What's more interesting are the other favorites that pop up. The runners-up are 3 (Holy Trinity, the magic number, etc.) and 8, which is lucky in Chinese. The number 13 makes the top ten in spite of—or perhaps because of—its dangerous associations.
Round numbers that end in a 0 or 5 fall down the list; Bellos' working hypothesis is that those numbers sound like estimations, and nobody wants a vague estimation as their favorite number. Number 1 occupies the 22nd position. The first major outlier is i, the imaginary unit, at number 34. You can check the whole list and some of people's explanations at Bellos's website.
Personally, I think 2 was robbed.
Source: Nautilus
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Andrew's from Nebraska. His work has also appeared in Discover, The Awl, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Playboy, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with two cats and a snake.
