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The Mother Ditch 26 Aug 2013 | 05:39 pm
I was in Santa Fe for a couple of weeks. When I went out for my morning run, I followed a paved pathway along the “river” (a parched, sandy channel, even in the monsoon season). I found my way back to...
The wisterium of memory 16 Jun 2013 | 06:49 pm
Every spring it’s the same story. Those pendulous clusters of pinkish purplish blossoms come droopling off a pergola in a little park around the corner, and I spend the next half hour desperately sear...
A little theorem 5 May 2013 | 08:17 pm
Often I wish that I knew more mathematics and understood it more deeply. But then I wouldn’t have the pleasure of discovering afresh things that other people have known for years. (In some cases hundr...
Mapping the Hilbert curve 26 Apr 2013 | 06:52 pm
In 1877 the German mathematician Georg Cantor made a shocking discovery. He found that a two-dimensional surface contains no more points than a one-dimensional line. Thus begins my latest column in Am...
Flying Nonmetric Airways 4 Apr 2013 | 05:35 pm
It’s the nature of triangles that no one side can be longer than the sum of the other two sides: For triangle ABC, AC ≤ AB + BC. This is the triangle inequality. Euclid proved it (Book I, Proposition ...
Sphere packings and Hamiltonian paths 13 Mar 2013 | 08:57 pm
In an American Scientist column published last November, I discussed efforts by groups at Harvard and Yale to identify arrangements of n equal-size spheres that maximize the number of pairwise contact...
Recursive driveling 1 Mar 2013 | 10:03 pm
If there’s anything inaner than turning literature into drivel, it’s turning drivel into drivel. I’ve added a “recurse” button to the drivel generator. It feeds the output back to the input, like xero...
Driveling 25 Feb 2013 | 01:02 am
“The fine art of turning literature into drivel” is a specialty of mine. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. Here is a specimen of drivel that I extracted from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Work of A...
Joshua Trees and Toothpicks 8 Feb 2013 | 11:53 pm
After the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego last month, I took a day off for some botanical and mathematical tourism. I drove up to Joshua Tree National Park, in the high desert beyond the San B...
100 Years of Markov Chains 12 Jan 2013 | 08:58 pm
On January 23, 1913, the Russian mathematician Andrei Andreyevich Markov addressed the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, reading a paper titled “An example of statistical investigation o...
