Naskra, could you give some hints? "Trivial distinction" sounds quite vague.
I wonder if Martin Luther had a middle name.
Some years ago I read book called
Archimedes' revenge, which had quite hilarious passage about these beasts. I probably remember it wrong, but here we go anyway:
During the reformation a German monk was convinced that Pope Leo X was the beast, and to prove this he chose every Roman numeral from pope's name:
LEO
DE
CIMVS. They add to MDCLVI=1656. Then this monk noticed that he must add Leo's ordinal number, X, and it becomes MDCLXVI=1666. Now considering that M must be omitted as
Mystery, it's DCLXVI=666.
At the same time some other monk knew that Martin Luther was the beast. He thought that every letter of his name must be coded according to it's place in the alphabet: A=1, B=2,..., but after K=10 (there's no difference between I and J) they increase by 10: L=20, M=30,... and after T=100 by hundreds: U=V=200, W=300... Now Martin Luthera= 30+1+80+100+9+40+20+200+100+8+5+80+1=674, so this isn't quite right yet. However, the monk was not deceived by the devil this time either, since he noticed that instead of I=9, it should be I=1. And again you get neatly 666. (Had to google little bit for this)
The book told that the latter monk was almost killed due to these views, and had to flee. He begun calculating the exact date of doomsday, and gained some following, but when the day came and nothing special happened, he's disappointed pupils almost killed him. After escaping for the second time he decided to quit numerology.
These are probably little bit coloured stories, or perhaps even complete fabrication, but it doesn't bother me.
There's probably somewhere in the net a machine to which you can feed names, and it tells how the beast's number is gotten from it.