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
Appellations in War and Peace (4 are minimal)
Abstract
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.

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.


The Hebrew Alphabet
 Hebrewlower-case latinMichigan-Clairmont
Alef א a )
Beit ב b B
Gimmel ג g G
Dalet ד d D
Hey ה h H
Vav ו v W
Zain ז z Z
Chet ח c X
Tet ט e +
Yud י y Y
Kaf כ k K
Kaf (final) ך j K
Lamed ל l L
Mem מ m M
Mem (final) ם o M
Nun נ n N
Nun (final) ן ` N
Samech ס s S
Ain ע i (
Pey פ p P
Pey (final) ף f P
Tzadi צ x C
Tzadi (final) ץ u C
Kuf ק q Q
Reish ר r R
Shin ש w $
Tav ת t T

More information on Web Hebrew: Web Hebrew at Snunit

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

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