July 7, 2026
Holy code, medieval plot twist
A 13th-Century Enumeration Algorithm, Ignored for 700 Years
A medieval letter trick is blowing minds — and sparking ‘make it a real paper’ drama
TLDR: A writer says a 1200s scholar described a simple but powerful way to list all letter arrangements, hinting an important idea was overlooked for centuries. Commenters split between being dazzled by the discovery and pushing the classic internet complaint: cool story, but where’s the formal paper?
A 13th-century mystic just wandered into modern internet discourse and somehow stole the show. The article argues that Abraham Aboulafia, writing about a spiritual practice of rearranging letters, described a strikingly orderly way to list every possible arrangement of a word — basically a step-by-step system built around one simple move: take the first letter and move it to the end. The author’s big hook is that this may have been sitting in plain sight for 700 years, ignored.
But the real fireworks are in the reactions. One camp is fully enchanted, with readers calling it beautiful and treating the find like a lost treasure dug out of a dusty library. The mood is part awe, part “how did nobody notice this earlier?” Another camp instantly swerved into academia-police mode: if this is such a serious discovery, why is it arriving as a blog series and not a formal journal paper? That tiny “minor nitpick” landed with classic comment-thread energy — polite on the surface, but very much a this belongs in the grown-up venue hot take.
And then came the comedy. One commenter dropped a sly Foucault’s Pendulum reference, basically hinting that whenever medieval mysticism, hidden patterns, and grand revelations appear in the same room, the internet is legally required to make an occult-literature joke. So yes: part math history, part mystical intrigue, part comment-section side-eye. Exactly the kind of nerd drama people love.
Key Points
- •The article analyzes a permutation-ordering method found in Abraham Aboulafia’s *Or ha-Sekhel* and frames it as a systematic enumeration algorithm.
- •For three-letter words, the method lists all six permutations in groups determined by the first letter.
- •Two rules are explicitly identified for the three-letter case: the sequence must end with the reverse of its starting word, and the leading letter is held fixed as long as possible.
- •The article highlights an unresolved ordering detail in the three-letter case as the question that led to the author’s broader discovery.
- •To extend the method from n letters to n + 1, Aboulafia uses a rotation rule that moves the first letter to the end, applied recursively at every level.