*** Click here for the current edition ***

DRAFT. This edition: January 28, 1998. First edition: September 19, 1997.

Equidistant Letter Sequences in Tolstoy's "War and Peace" Dror Bar-Natan and Brendan McKay

Appellations in War and Peace (4 are minimal)

In a recent paper, Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg found a surprising correlation between famous rabbis and their dates of birth and death, as they appear as equidistant letter sequences in the Book of Genesis. We make a smaller or equal number of mistakes, and find the same phenomenon in Tolstoy's eternal creation "War and Peace".

The paper is in English, but there are many Hebrew words and phrases within it. There are several ways of encoding Hebrew. Click on the link below that looks the most understandable to you.

Hebrew: דילוגי אותיות במלחמה ושלום.

Reversed Hebrew: .םולשו המחלמב תויתוא יגוליד

Hebrew coded in lower-case latin: dylvgy avtyvt bmlcmh vwlvo.

Michigan-Clairmont Hebrew coding: DYLWGY )WTYWT BMLXMH W#LWM.

On some systems, Hebrew printing is next to impossible. Here's a printer-ready Postscript version, with all the necessary fonts built in:

In mid-December 1997, Witztum published a "refutation" of our paper. A statement of no-response by Bar-Natan is here. A reply to those few of Witztum's arguments that deserve a reply will appear here when it is ready.

More information on Web Hebrew:

Back to the Torah Codes page
Back to the Mathematical Miracles page

© Copyright (1997) Dror Bar-Natan, drorbn@math.huji.ac.il and Brendan McKay, bdm@cs.anu.edu.au.