This edition: May 27, 1999. 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 (more information is available at the bottom of this page). 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 PDF version, with all the necessary fonts built in (but with no figures): (needs the Adobe Acrobat Reader).

• Many UNIX systems like PostScript even better:

Note: In mid-December 1997, Witztum published a "refutation" of a draft version of this paper. Since most of it has no value, hardly any of the small number of changes we made for the final version of our paper are the result of it. The present authors have no further interest¹ in Witztum's "refutation". However, if you did bother to read Witztum's "refutation", we strongly recommend that you also study a thorough scholarly rebuttal (needs the Adobe Acrobat Reader; you might need a recent version to read this file). It was prepared by a competent person whose name has never been publically mentioned in reference to codes and who wishes to remain anonymous.

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© Copyright (1997-9) Dror Bar-Natan, drorbn@math.huji.ac.il and Brendan McKay, bdm@cs.anu.edu.au.