tingilinde

the cisterscian number system

realistic probabilites

Cute examples from the always clever xkcd

 

really big numbers

a tip of the hat to Greg

 

ron graham

The NY Times obit

 

why 1 shows up a lot as a leading number

Bjarne notes a nice explanation of Benford's Law .. why certain distributions of numbers favor 1 as a leading term. 

 

a magical genius

The New York Times John Conway obituary.

snip

...

As a student, Dr. Conway cultivated his acknowledged lifelong preference for being lazy, playing games and doing no work. He could be easily distracted by what he called “nerdish delights.” He once went on a flexagon binge, courtesy of Mr. Gardner, who described flexagons as “polygons, folded from straight or crooked strips of paper, which have the fascinating property of changing their faces when they are flexed.”

He built a water-powered computer, which he called Winnie (Water Initiated Nonchalantly Numerical Integrating Engine). He read and annotated H.S.M. Coxeter’s edition of W.W. Rouse Ball’s classic work, “Mathematical Recreations and Essays,” and wrote Coxeter a lengthy letter that started a lifelong friendship between these two classical geometers.

Hired at Cambridge as an assistant lecturer, Dr. Conway gained a reputation for his high jinks (not to mention his disheveled appearance). Lecturing on symmetry and the Platonic solids, he might bring in a turnip as a prop, carving it one slice at a time into, say, an icosahedron, with its 20 triangular faces, eating the scraps as he went. “He was by far the most charismatic lecturer in the faculty,” his Cambridge colleague Peter Swinnerton-Dyer once said.

...

 

 

 

the best john conway tribute

from xkcd

 

john conway

A nice obit for the most charismatic - even magical - mathematician. 

a tip of the hat to Bjarne

 

tom lehrer is 91

So many pieces, but my favorite gives a nod to the fact he was a math professor.

beyond the simplistic (and wrong) fits . going a bit deeper into models

Epidemic modeling 101