Thoughts and observations on a wide variety of subjects...
[3/23/2026: At least one person complained that the post was too long (perhaps because of spending too much time watching cat videos), so I had Claude generate a couple of summaries, which I put at the end of the post. I made a couple of small corrections.] Another Pi Day, March 14, has come and Continue reading "Travels with Claude: A Natural Celebration of Pi"
Issai Schur s orthogonality relations for characters of group representations are surely a mathematical wonder. Unfortunately, the standard proof, even from great expositors like JP Serre and Michael Artin, typically involves a bunch of index gymnastics that never meant much to me. Back when I was a mathematician, I saw a great proof (for compact Lie Continue reading "An Illuminating Proof of…
My grandfather, Sam Kuhn, married my grandmother, then Minette Stroock, around 1920. They were from well-to-do families, and received a Steinway baby grand piano as a wedding present. By the time I first remember seeing it in the 1960s, my grandmother and her decorator had replaced its original black finish with a bright red, meant Continue reading "The Kuhn Piano Moves On"
TL;DR 1 stick of salted butter (8 tbsp) has about 1/3 tsp of salt. Maybe the same thing happens to you: you want to bake something. The recipe calls for unsalted butter. You have all the other ingredients. You have salted butter. You just don t have unsalted butter. You look at the recipe. It calls Continue reading "Do I Really Need to Use Unsalted Butter?"
I first heard of Hannes Alfvén s The Tale of the Big Computer when I read George Dyson s Turing s Cathedral. That book is readily available: Amazon tells me that I bought my own copy in September of 2013, and not only do I recommend it highly to anyone I think might be interested, I apparently bought Continue reading "The Tale of the Big Computer"
tl;dr After the NY Times purged some solutions and available guesses back in February, they quietly reintroduced them as available guesses, and they also shuffled around some of the solutions, without eliminating any. Wordle was born on June 19, 2021. Perhaps Josh Wardle wanted to celebrate the birth, because the first answer was cigar. Being Continue reading "Changes to Wordle that didn t get…
Just about exactly eight years ago, I wrote a series of posts that began with this paragraph: If you re a psychiatrist (or psychiatric RNCS) in the US reading this, you are almost certainly aware that all of our billing codes changed on Jan 1, 2013. If you are like most of the psychiatrists I know—at Continue reading "E M Codes 2021: Good News, for a Change"
In the process of looking up John Conway s Doomsday Algorithm for figuring out what day of the week any date falls on, I came across Chamberlain Fong s description of a simplification of Conway s algorithm that he and Michael Walters came up with, which they describe in a paper on arxiv. ( Any is in quotes for Continue reading "Doomsday Calendar, Part 3"
This internet thing, though. It seems to be all rabbit holes, all the way down. In my previous post, I wrote about John Conway s Doomsday Algorithm for figuring out what day of the way any day falls on. It seems that there are quite a few people who have spent a lot more time thinking Continue reading "Doomsday Calendar, Part 2"
[This wound up being Part 1 of 3. You can find Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. You don t need to read all three parts, but Part 3 does actually describe a significantly simpler algorithm than the one Conway used.] John Horton Conway, a great mathematician of unmatched playfulness, died recently at age 82 Continue reading "John Conway s Doomsday Calendar "