Seven

The Power of Seven.

"Why the number seven?" I hear you ask. For some bizarre reason I have always been drawn to it. This first began at an early age, when I was given a set of wooden shapes to play with. Each one represented a number from one to ten, and took the shape of cubes stacked on top of each other. My favourite was the seven because I liked the colour it was painted (cyan).

I'm sure my interest in it was purely mundane at this point. It was only as I grew older that I began to appreciate the large extent to which this number has found its way into so many areas of world culture and nature. There are certainly other numbers that merit equal interest and praise (let's not forget the not so humble number three for starters) but for our purpose here, my interest lies firmly with seven.

Another point I should make is that I'm no mathematician. Far from it in fact and the groans of my math teachers can still be heard if you listen hard enough...

Apart from my apparent lack of numerical talent, I can still admire the subtle and not so subtle beauty of numbers.

Music

Not so strange then that I should be drawn like a moth to the flame that is music, which is in itself an odyssey of mathematical wonder. The number of notes found in the traditional western Major Scale is, you guessed it, seven, and from this, the entire system of chords can be extrapolated. You can imagine then, that having a passing acquaintance with this scale certainly has its uses from the musician's point of view.

I won't ramble on for too long about all this.

Suffice it to say that this curious number has found its way into some curious places. Here are just a few facts of seven...

The opposite faces of a dice always add up to seven.

Another dotty subject is the ladybird which has a spot count of seven.

Seven has been found to be the optimum amount of sleep beneficial to the average human being.

Seven is the average persons digit span (the number of random digits that can be remembered in sequence).

Seven segments comprise each digit on the simple electronic clocks, timers and calculators.

Seven is the neutral pH value found between acidity and alkalinity.

According to the Baltimore classification, there are seven types of virus.

Yes I have only included the seven facts above!

I hope this has wetted your appetite to find out more and, believe me there's plenty of stuff on the web about this. If not then be boring and stick with your rather dull number 5!