On Why Nobody Cares That One Is The Loneliest Number

Hey guys - A brief pause from my Thirty Days of Challenge today, because I'm waiting for a picture that I need to have uploaded for me (and I left the camera at home, so if I want to do it, you won't get the post until tomorrow...) Instead, this is a post that was requested in the comments of Day One. I must preface this soon-to-be tirade, then, with a warning that, like many things I do, this is going to involve a lot of mathematics. I do not just mean that I'm going to go "the integral of x is half of x squared, lol" and be done with it. No. What follows is my justification of 5 being my favourite number.

The number five has, for quite some time now, been what I would consider my 'favourite' number. I mean, don't get me wrong, there are other really cool numbers - five million three hundred and eighteen thousand and eight, for instance, is quite nifty. But it just doesn't have the...appeal that, for me, five sums up so well. Did you know, for instance, that five is a prime number? That means that, besides 1 and itself, five has no divisors. The first three prime numbers are 2, 3, and 5 (1 is discounted for many reasons, which I shan't get into in this post, 4 is discounted because it can be expressed as the product of 2 and 2.) From reading this, it should be obvious that 5 is not only prime, but it is also the sum of two primes, and the sum of the two primes that came before it. The number five has quite a few other properties to do with special kinds of prime numbers, such as being the first Safe Prime (numbers N that are prime, and satisfy N = 2P + 1, where P is also prime), as well as being the only number to be in a twin prime pair twice (a twin prime being a set two primes whose difference is 2.)

Speaking of being the sum of the numbers 2 and 3, 5 is also a Fibonacci number. The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers that is created by repeatedly summing the previous two numbers in the series together. Thus, starting with '1,1' (as it is defined) we obtain the third and fourth terms by going (1 + 1 = 2, 1 + 2 = 3) leaving us with a sequence of '1,1,2,3' - obviously the next term is '5' as 2 + 3 = 5, and so 5 is not only a member of the Fibonacci sequence, but also the fifth member of the Fibonacci sequence.

There are five platonic solids. These solids, comprised of the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and the icosahedron, are the basis for the standard player's dice in most games. There are other dice (for example, the pentagonal trapezohedron - the d10) however any die that is not one of the platonic solids will not roll quite as nicely (or, often, as fairly) as one that is. This is because the platonic solids are the only solids where each edge is congruent (exactly the same), each angle is congruent, and each vertex is congruent. Thus, if you were ever wondering why your d10/d100 doesn't roll as well as your d4/d6/d8/d12/d20, there is your answer. Really, the only reason they were invented was because it was so annoying to get a percentage with other means.

Now, I could sit here and wax mathematical at you for quite some time, but the number five has applications to other areas of science (and life, and so forth) that I find quite interesting as well - plus, I've got so many more posts that I can do about maths! In biology, for instance, it can be seen that many flora and fauna in nature exhibit pentamerism, a kind of rough natural symmetry involving five protrusions - this can be seen by cutting an apple in half and observing the star-shaped pattern the seeds make, or by looking at (the vast majority of) starfish.

In music, a perfect fifth is the basis for the majority of western systems of music, as it is the most consonant harmony. Consonance, for those not in the know, is the opposite of dissonance...it's like...the property of things sounding really nice together. Kind of like harmony, only not. Five is the number of lines on a stave. Michael Jackson started in the Jackson 5. Take 5 is my favourite jazz song - it contains five beats per bar.

We cannot, then, forget TV shows such as Babylon 5, nor should we ignore the fact that there are 5 fighters in a standard sentai team (think of the power rangers, or the sailor scouts, for instance.) The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy is a trilogy of five books, and there are five classical elements (fire, water, air, earth, and aether) - plus that Bruce Willis film. We must remember, remember, the 5th of November. Shakespeare wrote most of his verse in iambic pentameter, whilst the first and last stanzas of all haiku have 5 syllables. And of course, there is the high-five.

The moral of this story is that one should subscribe to the law of fives, as taught by discordianism. If one listens to discordianism (basically a self-parodying philosophy which subscribes to Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos - it's genuinely quite cool, and I suggest you look it up) there is the law of fives, which states that...well...it's best if I just quote directly from the Principia Discordia for you:

The Law of Fives states simply that: All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5

The Law of Fives is never wrong.

—Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia, Page 00016