A mathematician blogs.
The following is a mathematical capsule biography of Diophantus, he of the equations with integer solutions: Here lies Diophantus, the wonder behold. Through art algebraic, the stone tells how old: God gave him his boyhood one-sixth of his life, One twelfth more as youth while whiskers grew rife; And then yet one-seventh ere marriage begun; Continue reading Halfway
There s no February 29 this year. My older daughter is starting to become aware of calendars and insisted on the 27th that it was the last day of February. I told her no, it s not, but February is a shorter month it only has 28 days. Except some years it has 29, but we ll Continue reading YOU get a leap year! And YOU get a leap year!
It’s Martin Luther King Day and also the day of the presidential inauguration. (Which is an… interesting juxtaposition.) How often does this happen? The relevant definitions are: So the two have coincided on Monday, January 20, 1997 (Clinton’s second inauguration) and Monday, January 21, 2013 (Obama’s second). Given the 28-year cycle of the calendar in Continue reading Two bits of inauguration…
John Cook tweeted, from his account Analysis Fact I responded that The third of these was somewhere in my head; the first one is trivial; I had to play around a bit to find the second one. These all have in common that: So what s going on here? It s probably a bit more revealing to Continue reading Morrie s law plus one
The Spanish translation of ELEVEN PLUS TWO = TWELVE PLUS ONE is ONCE MAS CUATRO = CATORCE MAS UNO . Why? (Or perhaps TRECE MAS DOS = DOCE MAS TRES, but that s not as good in Mark Dominus sense since it involves less rearrangement of the letters you can just swap CE and S ) Etymologically Continue reading Translate ELEVEN PLUS TWO = TWELVE PLUS ONE into Spanish
AgentRocket, at Metafilter, asked a few weeks ago for modern song names with parentheses, saying that it s hard to find songs after about 2000 with parentheses in the title. officialcharts.com explains why: version control (this will come up later), to make songs easier to find, to cut down long titles, and so on. And as Continue reading Percentage of songs with parentheses in the title
My second child was born on the day of the new moon, closest to the winter solstice, in the darkest year in recent memory (that is, 2020). I remember there was a new moon because there was a solar eclipse that day. In the year of her birth, her birthday fell during Hanukkah. Maybe the Continue reading Is Hanukkah s new moon always the darkest one?
As I observed last week, four points is not enough to win one s group in the World Cup. With four points (a win, a loss, and a draw) you have roughly a 50% chance of advancing to the knockout stage, based on historical data. We can also verify this by working out all the possible Continue reading Four points is not enough the enumerative version
John D Cook wrote, following the latest episode of Kevin Stroud s History of English podcast, that if a consonant at the end of a word is doubled, it s probably S, L, F, or Z. It appears that some elementary school teachers teach a doubled final consonant rule that is roughly the converse of this: If Continue reading Press will buzz off, or, doubled letters at the ends of words
The World Cup just started. As you may know, there are 32 teams, in eight groups of four. Each team in a group plays three games, one against each of the other teams in the group. The top two teams in each group advance to the knockout round of 16; teams get three points for Continue reading Four points is not enough