What the Systems Assign

Fifty-five carries no developed religious symbolism; the older traditions did not take it up, and its significance is confined to its arithmetical form and to the reductive readings of modern numerology, where the repeated five is sometimes treated as a heightened call to adventure and the senses. The honest account is a number whose whole interest lies in being at once triangular and Fibonacci, a coincidence of two of the more attractive number sequences, rather than in any body of tradition.

Walter Burkert's study of the Pythagorean tradition would treat fifty-five's status as both a triangular number and a Fibonacci term as a genuine mathematical property rather than a symbolic one, the sort of fact the ancient arithmological writers prized in numbers such as six and twenty-eight but did not, on his account, derive from Pythagoras himself; the coincidence of the two properties in one number is simply arithmetic, not evidence of any deliberate design by either the Fibonacci sequence's medieval discoverer or the ancient triangular-number tradition. The Fibonacci property noted above has a further consequence: the ratio of fifty-five to the Fibonacci number before it, thirty-four, is approximately zero point six one eight, an early approximation of the golden ratio, phi, which the ratio of consecutive Fibonacci numbers approaches ever more closely as the sequence grows.