representing the presidents' names as hillsides

So, I was playing around with numbers and Presidents' names and whatnot, and started wondering about the gematria of these names.

Washington hillside

By way of background, gematria is a type of Hebrew numerology.  Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a numerical value. The first nine have the values 1 to 9. The next 9 have the values 10 to 90. The final four have the values 100 to 400. A word's total value is the sum of the values of its letters. For example, the Hebrew word חי, meaning life, has a value of 18. Which is why 18 is a lucky number in Judaism.*

Polk hillside

So, I wondered what the gematria of the various President's last names would be. In order to do that, I had to start by creating values for the letters in the Latin alphabet. In case anyone's interested, the values of the names range from 104 (Obama) to Taylor (1,081).

Roosevelt hillside

Then I started wondering about what it would look like to graph the Presidents' progressions of the cumulative gematria, letter by letter of the names. To explain with a concrete example, let's look at "Taft." "T" has a value of 200. "Ta" has a value of 201. "Taf" has a value of 207. "Taft" has a value of 407. Of course -- and I should have thought of it before I started -- these graphs all kind of look like cross sections of hillsides. Or cumulative probability functions (assuming you normalize to a final
total value of 1).

I think the Roosevelt hill looks the best, though Washington looks good too. Polk is pretty boring. I've reproduced them in this post. But if you want to see all 39 (some presidential last names have been repeated, but I don't want to bother repeating**), follow this link.

Yeah...I need a hobby.


*And, by the way, the name of Asher's cat.
**Yeah, I put together this mishegass, and say I don't want to bother with repetition. Go figure.