[Israel.pm] gimatria

[Anatoly Vorobey]

You wrote on Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 06:04:00PM +0300:
> Hello,
> 
> Anyone can point me to a regular expression that can
> recognize or generate  "gimatria"?
>
> Alternatively, anyone can point me to a resource (web page,
> article, book...) where the principles and rules are
> explained?

If you google on 'gematria' (note the spelling), you'll find several
general-purpose pages. Add a relatively advanced term to the search 
(such as 'filling' or 'milui') to find some more advanced pages.

> I'm looking for something more detailed than just the
> mapping of alphabet letters to numbers, I'm looking for the
> rules that explain  what is a valid representation of a
> number in Hebrew letters.

There are some examples here:
http://www.inner.org/gematria/gematria.htm

In general, since people interested in gematria have traditionally been 
converting words to numbers rather than vice versa, there is no single 
rule for "what is a valid representation of a number in Hebrew letters" 
as far as gematria is concerned. Every possible word has a numeric 
value, and what more, several of them (with "filling", under different 
systems, under different representations of the terminal letters).

AFAIK, if you're going from a number to a word: 1) if less than a 
thousand, start with the hundreds, using an additional tav (400) if 
necessary, then tens and singles. Avoid 10+ combinations for numbers 15 
and 16, use 9+ combinations instead (this is done to avoid producing
sacred combinations of letters reminiscent of the Tetragrammaton). If 
you have thousands, this is a 
year number, and it's the current millennium, just omit them; otherwise 
write out thousands and higher digits as a separate word beforehand.

Disclaimer: this is not my field and I'm not an expert.

-- 
avva
"There's nothing simply good, nor ill alone" -- John Donne