Eighty-seven is three times twenty-nine and reduces to fifteen and then six. It is a clear instance of a number that carries no traditional religious symbolism, and the honest treatment is to say so rather than to invent. The older systems developed the small numbers, the notable primes and the round figures; eighty-seven was not among them. Its one familiar occurrence is rhetorical, the four score and seven years of the Gettysburg Address, a poetic way of saying eighty-seven, which lends the phrasing dignity but gives the number no lore.
Eighty-seven factors as 3 x 29 and carries 4 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 33, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.
Florence Campbell, a student of Balliett's, restated and extended the chart in Your Days Are Numbered in 1931, and Juno Jordan, founder of the California Institute of Numerical Research, standardised the modern four-part chart of life path, expression, soul urge and personality numbers in 1965; both writers worked from name and birth date rather than from any older number philosophy.
The genuine Pythagorean number philosophy that this modern chart borrows its name from left no writings of its own: Pythagoras and his early followers taught only by mouth, and what survives of their number theory comes instead through Nicomachus of Gerasa, whose Introduction to Arithmetic of the first century CE became the standard authority for a thousand years, and through Iamblichus, who drew on Nicomachus two centuries later; neither wrote anything resembling a name-and-birthdate numerology.