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A Composite Without Lore

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A Composite Without Lore

Ninety-two is four times twenty-three and reduces to eleven and then two. It is one of the integers in the nineties that carry no traditional religious symbolism; the older systems did not develop it. Its one factual modern association is the atomic number of uranium, ninety-two protons marking the heaviest naturally occurring element, which is a fact of chemistry rather than a piece of lore.

Ninety-two factors as 2^2 x 23 and carries 6 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 76, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.

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.

Nicomachus's own arithmetic sorted whole numbers into deficient, perfect and abundant by comparing them with the sum of their own divisors, a genuinely ancient classification that has nothing to do with the letter charts later numerologists built; the modern system that assigns meaning to digit sums is a distinct, twentieth-century construction that happens to borrow the Pythagorean name.

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