The Ninth Wave, Devyatiy Val, or Девятый вал simultaneously attracts attention as the magnum opus of Aivazovsky, and stimulates discussion across disciplines about repetition, folklore, and time.

This latter task is also accomplished by the work of Julie Mehretu and Piet Mondrian, but while their paintings depict abstract formal mathematical experiments, Aivazovsky's shows the ocean.

Although whole numbers form a timeless and transcultural way of making meaning, from storytelling, to artwork, to divination and ceremonies, there is little publication on the cultural significance of numbers, aside from scattered mentions of the cult of Pythagoras. Since Aivazovsky, an Armenian who adopted a Russian name and a place in Russian society, was connected with a very old tradition of numbers through his culture, he was able to fully mobilize the critical power of the number nine in the title of his painting The Ninth Wave. As Taddesse Berisso writes, in "The Riddles of Number Nine Among the Guji-Oromo Culture," "The first riddle about number nine is one that associates it with a critical time or moment. This is evident in the proverb, Gaalie Sagali bulle, Kudhan bullu hindadhabu, ‘A camel that survived the ninth day would survive the tenth.'" As with the "straw that broke the camel's back," here the camel forms the center of the metaphor which describes the threshold between one state and another, by means of the number nine.

The Ninth Wave is one of the few paintings to form the basis of a biological theory. As the biologist Gregory A. Petsko writes, the painting "depicts a huge wave about to crash down on the survivors of a shipwreck, who are desperately clinging to the broken mast. The question for all of us, as biology - driven by the combined forces of genomics and bioinformatics - seems about to become an information science, is whether hypothesis-driven, individual-investigator-initiated experimentation is about to suffer the fate of the people in the painting."