Fifty-seven is three times nineteen and reduces to twelve and then three. It has no traditional religious symbolism, and the honest treatment is to say so plainly. Its one widely recognised use is commercial: the Heinz slogan of fifty-seven varieties, adopted in 1896, was chosen by Henry Heinz as a memorable figure rather than an accurate count, and it lodged the number in popular culture without giving it any deeper meaning.
Fifty-seven falls outside Cheiro's original 1926 compound-number scheme, which runs only from ten to fifty-two, so this atlas gives it no reading attributed to his book; Balliett's 1908 chart reduces it instead to three, self-expression and sociability in the standard modern keyword list, a reading that predates Henry Heinz's 1896 slogan by more than a decade and has no connection to it, the marketing coinage and the American numerology chart having been devised independently for entirely different purposes. In chemistry, fifty-seven is the atomic number of lanthanum, the element that gives its name to the whole lanthanide series of the periodic table, elements fifty-seven through seventy-one, popularly if imprecisely known as the rare earths. Lanthanum itself was first isolated in 1839 by the Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander, who named it from the Greek lanthanein, to lie hidden, since it had escaped detection within a supposedly pure sample of another rare-earth compound.