Continuing the discussion from Is there an interactive fiction fanbase on Bluesky?:
My favorite numbers are:
Given the my top fav is 8^2, and 8 is in my top-5 list, that feels targeted, like I unknowingly fell into some psychological trend or category. 
Lol, Iād have to say 17,827. Just because itās random.
Also, 42.
ā¦because in my sixth grade class as an 11-year-old, the teacher assigned each student a number alphabetically by last name, so I was in position seven, and the girl I had a crush on was in position eight. But just doodling"87" or ā78ā when I was caught up in the throes of infatuation felt too obvious; I should pick a three digit number, instead. And since Iād been competing with my friend to see who could memorize more digits of pi, ā3ā felt like the obvious digit to start any sequence of numbers, so I started using ā387ā whenever I needed a random number.
Later, when making my first email account, I read that most people just use their name plus a number. I felt using my first name was too obvious. My middle name would work, but it felt pretty commonplace as well. People normally shorten my middle name to just the first four letters, but what if I did the opposite? Iād leave those four letters out, altogether! Thus, I registered āander387 at hotmail dot comā. I think I wound up signing up for ifMUD as ander387 originally, too.
I abandoned that username as a piece of embarrassing juvenilia more than 20 years ago.
Eight is my favorite number to look at. 8888888. So pretty.
Two is my favorite number spelled out, because itās such a great example of how batshit crazy the English language is. TWO. WTF?
Nine is my favorite actual number, because I had such a hard time learning my multiplication tables when I was small, until someone showed me the finger trick for the nines and it blew my head off how cool that was.
When I was in elementary school, 3 was my favourite number. I wish I could attribute it to that we live in 3D space or the virtues of trigonometry, but no, it was for the simple fact that the minimum contact points for stationary stability was 3. Yeah, I was easily amused. You can make a table with only 3 legs?! *mind blown* 
Now that Iām more sophisticated and have moved on from grape juice squeeze boxes, my favourite number is 12. I feel that it should be our counting system. The way you can divide it evenly into 2, 3, 4, 6 parts seems so superior to base 10 counting. 12 months, 24 hour days, 60 minutes and secondsā¦ a dozen eggs! The magic of twelve never ends.
My favourite two-digit integer is 43. As a maths teacher, people often assume that there must be some clever significance to it, but I actually just like the aesthetics of those two digits next to one another. Other favourites are 243, 2431 and 4+3i.
In English, my favorite number is 42 (obviously).
In French, 76. Both soixante-seize and septante-six just fit well in ways that, say, 33 (trente-trois) donāt.
Mine is 5. Dates back to childhood when we used to play a game very similar to Yatzee. The 5 on a dice is so symmetric!
Mine is 64738. Once an icon for reset. Sometimes I wish it could be used in real-life too. As much as Cmd+Z.
(Also, I have a 4 digit one which is much more personal but I canāt reveal it because I tend to use it too much as pin or password anywhere)
In order of appearance:
7 - got influenced as a kid when I read a Donald Duck holiday book which favored a short story about the significance of the number 7, along with a large number of examples. No doubt for any number such a list can be made, but at the time I was easily impressed. 
142857 - IMHO a cool number which does not include any multiple of 3 (0,3,6,9). Multiply it by 2 and you get 285714; multiply it by 3 and you get 428571 etc. (it is actually the repeating number pattern for 1/7). 142857 - Wikipedia
42 - Well what can I say. When I read HHGG I came across it and was thinkingā¦ multiplying 6 by 9 in base 13 would indeed produce 42. Is God using base 13 arithmetic? My math interest considered this to be the only logical explanation. When I was working on a graphics editor for a project in Japan, I came across 42 in the TIFF specifications as well: āThe number 42 was chosen for its deep philosophical significance.ā Surely this was significant . Phrases from The Hitchhikerās Guide to the Galaxy - Wikipedia
8 - My current favorite. Octarine is my favorite color! Octarine | Discworld Wiki | Fandom The number 8 will also feature heavily in my current WIP. When I was teaching Dutch to Chinese students, they found in particular the number ā88ā (āachtentachtigā) hard to pronounce. But somehow it put a smile on my face. Ah well, my pronounciation of Chinese probably sounds funny to them as well. I always have a hard time distinguishing the various āsā sounds.
Iāll start with an old chestnut of maths folklore: my favourite integer is 2, because it is the only even prime, making it the oddest of them all.
My absolute top-tier, most interesting integer is 163. Fellow maths practitioners will instantly recognize it and sagely nod, acknowledging its awesomeness. More about this one later, but I have some second tiers.
First, the OP said nothing about integers, just numbers. They could be real numbers. Therefore Khinchinās Constant K = 2.685452ā¦ qualifies. What is this and why is it amazing? OK, take any integer sequence you can think of, letās call it {a(1), a(2), a(3), ā¦}. Take the sequence of the geometric means of successive terms, this is, b(n) = (a(1)a(2) ā¦ a(n))^(1/n). Then the sequence b(n) converges to K as n becomes larger, regardless of what sequence you chose. Check it out.
In reality, the above is not strictly true: not all sequences behave in this way, but almost all do (in a sense that can be defined with precision). I can guarantee that any sequence you can think of will comply with the above property, unless you deliberately construct it not to, which is difficult.
There are analytical expressions for Khinchinās constant. One of them is that log K equals the integral between 0 and 1 of logā(1/x)/(1+x). Little is known about the algebraic properties of K; in particular, we donāt know if itās rational.
Back to integers. One of the most interesting ones I know is M = 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000. Iām not kidding. This is the size of the largest possible sporadic finite simple group, called the Monster Group. Finite simple groups are a kind of building block for all finite groups, so they are very important in Algebra, and they have been classified according to a taxonomy. There are a number of families in this taxonomy, plus a few that do not belong in any of the families. These are called sporadic simple groups.
Why there should exist sporadic simple groups at all, nobody understands very well. There is no a priori reason why all finite simple groups couldnāt fit into a few neat ways of generating them all, which is the case for the families in question, but there are some that just do not fit. They are isolated, independent, totally ad hoc. But, once we accept these sporadic groups exist, the amazing thing is that there are only a finite number of them - exactly 26! Why? Again, nobody has found a deeper reason.
This is what is called the Enormous Theorem, because it took more than 150 years, 500 authors, and 15,000 pages of literature scattered across hundreds of journals to provide a proof of this fact: All finite simple groups fall into one of 18 infinite families, plus 26 sporadic groups, and there are no others. The āthere are no othersā part is the really difficult one. This is a world record, of course. Eat your heart out, Guinness.
The Monster Group is the largest of these sporadic groups. It can be represented as a set of rotations of a space of 196,883 dimensions, and this is how it was originally constructed. For those of you coders that struggle with the intricacies of rotations in 3-dimensional space, please consider this for a moment, and, like the Ozymandias traveler, despair.
Nobody is sure what this exactly means, but it implies that there is, in some algebraic sense, a hard limit for how much symmetry a finite-dimensional space can possess. This boggles the mind.
There seem to be some half-understood implications for theoretical physics as well regarding M. Thatās too much. Wonāt go into it today.
Back to 163, which is my favourite because I came across this fact at the tender age of 16 and wanting to understand this was one of the reasons that compelled me to seek a career in mathematics. The fact is: exp(Ļā163) is almost an integer. Not only that, 163/log(163) also is almost an integer. Try it. This is not a coincidence, much less a double coincidence. There is a deep reason for it, which is very difficult to explain without getting technical.
163 is the largest value of n such the class number of the field extension of the rationals by ā(-n) has class number 1, meaning that its ring of integers is a unique factorization domain. The issue of factorization in quadratic fields is one of the driving forces of algebraic number theory. Since there is a largest possible field that has, in some sense, the best possible factorization property, 163 shows up in a huge number of algebraic problems. The splitting of generalized primes in number fields is tied to the properties of modular functions, the maximal real subfields of cyclotomic fields, and others.
163 appears as the largest instance of a quadratic field having unique factorization and as the smallest instance of a real cyclotomic field not having it. This is a unique property with deep implications.
You may be cool, but you will not ever be half as cool as 163.
See also OEIS A003173.
many of my favorite number is either from Commodore 64 (as in Marco) or from Naval history (e.g. the displacement in long tons of thick-hided, gun-toting Leviathansā¦)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio
127 is pretty nice.
Back in high school, I picked 239. I hadnāt read HAKMEM yet, but when I did, I learned that Richard Schroeppel had picked it for the same reasons I had.
13 and 169. When I was a kid, I kept hearing how 13 is an unlucky number, and I decided to make it my favorite precisely because everyone else seemed to dislike it. 169 is thirteen thirteens, so itās just the same concept, just taken a bit further.
Kudos for mentioning HAKMEM. Some of the items in there are still open. Finding interesting questions is kind of an art, and the people behind mastered it (one can find some very well known names listed there). Itās worth posting a link to a searchable version of the original document:
My favorite number is 808. I am 808.
Back in the ancient times of pagers, I would sometimes want my dad to call me. Instead of leaving a voicemail or my phone number, I would simply type in 808. He would look down at his pager and see 808, which looks a lot like BOB, which is my nickname. (Robert is my nicholasname.)
But my love for this wonderful number goes further than obsolete technology. Whenever my wife or I notice itās 8:08, we proclaim āItās Bob Time!ā And August 8th (8/08, no matter what order you write dates) is Bob Day! And I try to sneak the number into my interactive fiction too.
So, yeah ā¦ 808 is more than a preference. It is useful to me, and itās a real boost that the whole world proclaims my name twice a day (less than that if using the 24-hour clock, way more than that if counting all the time zones).
808 is a way of life. 808 is me.
Page 72 mentions the relationship between 69 and 105 in different bases which relates back to Zork Iās pile of leaves which contains 69,105 leaves. 
Favorite numbers:
1, because itās #1.
i, because itās the most imaginative
5, because it has the personality I identify with the most. All numbers and letters have always had unique personalities to me, for as long as I can remember.