Strike up the band.  Cue the fireworks.  This is the 100th post of my blog.

Sunday, when I posted about ICE, I noticed it was the 99th post to my blog.  The wheels in my head started turning.  My first thought was the next post had better be something really special to mark this milestone.  Then I thought what is so significant about 100?  And why do we single it out as meaningful?  Those two questions (what and why) are the basis of most if not all of the posts in my “curiosity” category, so the direction of this post grew from that.

My attention turned first to presidential terms of office in the United States.  The “first 100 days” of a presidency have traditionally been seen as a kind of barometer – how will this guy (or gal) fare for the next four years?

But that is a relatively recent convention, dating back only to FDR.  When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, he took swift action to address the nation’s crippling financial and economic woes with things like the Emergency Banking Act, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and he began the “fireside chats” on radio that calmed a frightened citizenry, as if to say “I got this.” 

By comparison, George W. Bush looks like a slacker with just 7 laws passed/signed in the same timeframe!

Then I got to thinking:  for someone in 1933 to settle on 100 days in office as a meaningful representation of how the new president is doing and is going to do, 100 already had to be a significant number.  Else, why not the first year, or the first legislative session, or the first full moon?

Time to fire up the search engine and go looking.  Wow!  Did you know…

• there are 100 years in a century?
• on the Celsius scale, 100 degrees is the boiling temperature of water?
• the United States Senate has 100 Senators?
• there are 100 yards in an American football field?
• there are 100 letter tiles in a Scrabble game?

It’s no wonder, then, that 100 conveys a sense of significance.  100 is the basis of percentages (per cent meaning “per hundred” in Latin), with 100 percent being a full amount.  As far back as the early Roman Empire, they fixed the sestertius coin to be 1/100 of an aureus coin; they also organized their military into groups of 100 lead by a centurion. “C” is the Roman numeral for 100; it comes from the Latin word centrum, whence we get cent.  And so it’s rather obvious that a century is 100 years, a centenarian is 100 years old, and as far as modern coinage goes there are 100 pennies (also called cents) in a dollar.

But apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the freshwater system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?  Moreover, if they were organizing money, and soldiers around the number 100, it had to be meaningful to them already; they can’t be the source of 100’s specialness. So, why is 100 meaningful?

It probably has something to do with the rather universal human tendency to use the number 10 as a numerical anchor.  I would propose that the simplest speculative answer (i.e., my best guess) to why exactly this would be is the very universal human experience of having 10 fingers – finger-counting being the most accessible form of numeracy anywhere.  When you consider that 100 is a perfect square number and its square root is 10 (i.e., 10×10=100), and the sum of the first ten (10) odd numbers is 100 (1+3+5+7+9+11+13+15+17+19=100), it’s hard not to see a kind of numerical pattern coming into focus with 10 as its base.  I’m generally wary of assigning any meaningful or “magical” connotations to numbers specifically, because you can find them for many digits (e.g., the supposed efficacy of a Catholic “novena” consists of saying a prayer nine times), and certainly we can also see the number 12 being significant in various religious, historical, and cultural contexts:  there were twelve Olympians, The Twelve Tables (first written codification of Roman law, established around 451-450 BCE), twelve lictors accompanying a Roman magistrate (consul) in public (only six if he was a mere praetor), twelve apostles, twelve months in a year…etc….etc.  Hmm, but still, there were only 10 commandments!

In the East, 100 represents abundance and prosperity, while in the West it signifies perfection or totality (e.g., getting a score of 100% on an exam, applying yourself 100% to a task).  And while I had hoped to conclude this post with a single, definitive reason why 100 matters, I’m afraid that I could not find the answer.  Just a lot of gut feelings and speculation. And a ridiculously esoteric academic pdf by a classicist specializing in ancient numeracy from which I learned about the “famous” (his word) sexagesimal (60-based) system used in the “sophisticated” (again, his word) Mesopotamian mathematics; there’s 60 minutes of my life I’ll never get back!

I think we often get so caught up in rehashing and justifying the past or worrying about the future that we miss out on the present.