In one of my all-time favorite books, The Chosen by Chaim Potok, there's a big scene involving a Hasidic Jewish rabbi going into an amazing lecture based on the magic of numbers, how the sum total of each of two words adds up to the same total as one word. The lead character of the book, who has "head for math" enjoys this even though his father has told him such calculations are meaningness, like horoscopes (or LJ quizzes, he he).