Mmmm, numerology. Cargo cultism's approach to mathematics; just as some people apparently think that wearing a labcoat and owning fancy instruments is all that it takes to make you a scientist, they think that merely doing complicated things with figures is enough to make you a mathematician.
This is magical thinking at its finest - wear a white coat and own strange apparatus, throw numbers all over the place in way that bewilders others, talk into a box with cans on your ears next to a straight bit of land on your pacific beach; they're all simply treated as spells, strange actions carried out with the conviction that, if done the right way, will bring about the result you want. They're almost right, too - to the unscientific, the actions of scientists look exactly like this.
Where these idiots diverge from real science is that they do not know or care what the underlying mechanism is of the things they see; they work exclusively with trying to reproduce what they can directly observe and, if that's not enough, resort to pure guesswork to fill in the gaps. In this way, a cargo cultist on a pacific island tries merely to reproduce the casing of a radio they have seen or heard described; not even imagining what might be inside, how it might work, or even that there might need to be something inside at all. All a person with such a mindset sees in advanced mathematics is meaningless squiggles being constantly rearranged in confusing patterns, so this is all they try to reproduce: patterns and confusion.
When the primary school arithmetic they usually posess is not enough to make equations move in the ways they've seen, they resort to guesswork, which is what leads to the bizarre operations we see in "sciences" like numerology such as swapping digits and drawing connections between numbers whose symbols are visually similar. This produces the same sense of confusion, creating vague patterns without a clear idea why, that they get from looking at real mathematical operations and, having achieved the same "look and feel", they assume the two activities are the same; that they must be doing real maths.
