What the number 6174 can teach us about Prayer

Just recently, I ran across an article by a Japanese professor about the uniqueness of the number 6174. Being a math major, it piqued my interest and I was not disappointed. A mathematician by the name of D. R. Kaprekar came up with an operation where you would take any 4-digit number where not all the digits are the same, and make the largest number out of the digits and the smallest number of the digits, i.e. arrange the digits from biggest to smallest and from smallest to biggest adding 0’s as necessary. If you subtract the smallest from the biggest, you get another number. That is the Kaprekar Operation (hereby called KO). The amazing thing is that if you then take the final result and do the KO on it and repeat, you will eventually end up with the number 6174. In fact, we can say that it will take you at most 7 times of doing that KO to reach 6174.

For example, let’s pick 5623. The biggest number is 6532 and the smallest is 2356. Subtracting, we get 4176. Repeating we get 7641 and 1467, then 6174. If we continue, we get 7641 and 1467 (look familiar?) and then 6174 again.

Another one, 40. Biggest number is 4000 and smallest is 0004, or 4. Subtract, 3996. Then 9963 and 3699, subtract, 6264. 6642 and 2466, subtract, 4176. Then 6174,

For me, this is the area of Math that I really enjoy. It is called Number Theory. It gets into how you can tell if a number is divisible by 3, 6, 9, 4, or 8? What is a pattern to the decimals when you divide a number by 7? How can you find prime numbers? Etc. So of course, this was so cool to me that I wanted investigate it. Now in math, you can do this a couple of ways. First, you can try it out on a few numbers. So I did and it worked. Then, since we only have 9999 numbers to try (actually there are even less that we need to try but I was in a hurry), I wrote a quick Excel Macro to run the operation and spit out the results. Boom, it worked like a charm. After 72 lines of code, I had a spreadsheet that had all the possible input numbers and the result of using the Kaprekar Operation on them iteratively. By Joe, all of them ended in 6174 in 7 or less iterations. Thus, this article called this number Beautiful in a mathematical sense. Yes, math nerds have a different take on what is beautiful when it comes to numbers.

By the way, these are called the kernel of the operation. If you use 3 digit numbers, the kernel is 495. There is no kernel for 2, 5 or 7 digit numbers and there are multiple kernels for 6, 8, 9, or 10 digit numbers.

But that was not fully satisfying to me as a Mathematician. I wanted to know why. What is going on behind the scene? This is where the article burst my bubble. It said that we can show that it works for all 4-digit numbers where the digits are not all the same; we can show actually that we only need to check 30 numbers to ensure that it works. But the one thing that no one can prove is why this works.

After mentioning a couple of other of these type of beautiful numbers, the author made a comment that seemed interesting to me. He said that we are drawn to these numbers “because they are so beautiful. And because they are so beautiful we feel there must be something more to them when in fact their beauty may just be incidental.”

While the analogy breaks down a bit, I started thinking about prayer. Sometimes, we want to pray and tell God to do what we want. When it works, we are happy. We think we found a formula: we pray, God responds, we are happy. Beautiful, right? Yes, it is beautiful but that does not prove why it works. Prayer works like that only when we happen to want the same thing as God’s will. Incidental! We did not discover some great truth. In a sense, we got lucky. If we want something outside of God’s will and pray for it, we then can get disappointed when God does not answer our prayers the way we want. We cannot manipulate God. We need to rethink our attitude about prayer. As Carey Nieuwhof said in his blog, “prayer is not a button to be pushed nearly as much as it is a relationship to be pursued.”

But prayer is like the KO. Where the KO changes the number, prayer is meant to change the person praying. And just like eventually with the numbers, you will get to the kernel, with prayer, eventually, we get changed into someone looking after God’s will and not our own. Yes, it takes more than 7 times for this change to happen but if we let the Holy Spirit work on us, it will happen.

How can we be sure of that? Unlike with the KO, we do not have a finite number of cases to run to verify that prayer works. In addition, we have no way to mathematically prove that it works either. But, we can look at the Bible and see the pattern of God revealing his will when his people submit to him. I know that I fall into the trap of seeing prayer as a grocery list that we give to God. Instead, we need to see it as a way for us to grow closer to Him. We may ask for our way but God gives us something better: His Will. Just as the KO changes the number each time and eventually gets to the kernel, may we use prayer to help us change to be more conformed to God and His Will for our lives.