74-47
Following on from this, Joe Menosky, who graduated from Pomona College in 1979 and went on to become one of the story writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "infected" other Star Trek writers with it, and as a result the number (or its reverse, 74) occurs in some way or other in almost every episode of this program and its spin-offs Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise. The number might be mentioned in the dialogue, it might appear on a computer screen a character is looking at, and it might be a substring of a larger number. The number also appears on some of the DVD menu screens for the episodes. They range from extremely obvious (for example, "shields are down to 47%"), to very well hidden. Some examples are listed here: Voyager's registration number is NCC-74656, and warp factor 7 is 656 times the speed of light; substituting the 7 in for 656 would thus yield NCC-747. In one episode of Voyager, a character refers to an event that happened on Earth in the year 2209, which is 47 squared. In "Non Sequitur", an episode of that series, Harry Kim lives in apartment 4-G, G being the seventh letter of the alphabet. The intentionality of this reference to 47 was confirmed by Brannon Braga, the writer of that episode [1]. According to a joke by Rick Berman (the co-creator and executive producer of several Star Trek series), "47 is 42, corrected for inflation". This explanation is referenced in a Sev Trek cartoon [2]. Eventually it spread outside of Star Trek; 47s have been spotted in The Simpsons, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, Threshold, Alias, Lost, Scrubs, South Park and The West Wing.