Archive for the ‘Mathematics’ Category

Quiet Piggy

November 23, 2025

11 … 2 … 3 it’s Fibonacci day today; the omens foretell 5 in your future, and then 8, and then 13, and then 21, leaping upward in ever-greater jumps, in an elegant spiral of numbers (I used to be a mathematician, and still have a license to chatter enthusiastically about numbers and abstract patterns). This is today’s moment of wonder and delight, the only protection I can offer against what comes next.

A moral monster of great power, dripping corruption and careening into dementia, is the stuff of unbearable nightmare; we are all living in it. Even worse: behind this demonic figure stand cool-headed engineers of death and dominion. But today I talk about the figurehead of their plots, Our Overlord Grabpussy. In two of his recent forays with the press, which I report on here  from a New York Times story of 11/18 by Michael M. Grynbaum (which I believe to be the most accurate and detailed account of these two episodes — which I’ll call Saudi and Pedo); the NYT is behind a paywall for me, but three friends managed to get copies of the text for me.

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What’s your number?

November 18, 2025

My excellent sister-in-law-in-law Virginia Transue, widow of a mathematician who was the son of a mathematician, mused on Facebook this morning about the extraordinarily prolific and collaborative Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös:

Paul Erdös collaborated with so many people that mathematicians are often asked what their ERDÖS NUMBER is. If you wrote a paper with him your number was 1. If you wrote a paper with somebody who had written one with him it was 2…  My Bill’s Erdös number was 2, his father’s was 3

From my 7/27/09 Language Log posting “Erdös?”:

There are linguists with Erdős numbers of 2 (András Kornai), 3 (Geoff Pullum, via András), and 4 (me, via Geoff)

 

Someday he’ll come along

September 16, 2025

Calendrical intro. 3 … 4 … 5 … 📐 — once in every century the days are perfectly aligned, in the pattern of a 3-4-5 Pythagorean triangle:

9/16/25: 9 + 16 = 25, that is,  3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2

Today is Pythagoras Day for the 21st century; if you miss this bus, it will be a long wait till the next one.

But while you’re waiting, you can practice the song for the day,”Pythagorean Theorem”; from my 6/18/25 posting “The Pythagorean Impromptu”, about

a dream in which Danny Kaye sang the Pythagorean Theorem, in the form

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides

(which is the version the actual Danny Kaye sang in the 1958 movie Merry Andrew, and, yes, I do remember this from 1958)

… You can listen to Danny Kaye perform “Pythagorean Theorem” on YouTube here

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The Pythagorean Impromptu

June 18, 2025

A long (7:30 pm to 4:52 am) and pleasant (literally refreshing) sleep last night, after a long and difficult (2 am to 7:30 pm) day yesterday; I’ll put off a report on yesterday to the end of this posting, which is instead about how that sleep came to an end, in a half-waking reverie during which a sleep-final story dream morphed into the Pythagorean Impromptu, a dream in which Danny Kaye sang the Pythagorean Theorem, in the form

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides

(which is the version the actual Danny Kaye sang in the 1958 movie Merry Andrew, and, yes, I do remember this from 1958; I can also reproduce from memory Kaye’s

The pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true

from The Court Jester of 1955, though I have trouble working the flagon with the dragon into Kaye’s final aide-memoire) — the Pythagorean Theorem, sung to the tune of Franz Schubert’s Impromptu Op. 142 No. 2, a piano piece that I happen to have played in concerts when I was a teenager, but which, more important, was actually playing (in a wonderfully warm performance by Mitsuko Uchida) on the Apple Music in my bedroom as I came out of that reverie into consciousness, when I had the sense to recognize that the words of “Pythagorean Theorem” fit reasonably well into Schubert’s melody for that Impromptu at the beginning, but that the marriage of this text and tune rapidly comes unglued, and then I was fully awake, cleaned myself up for the day, and discovered that my blood pressure had returned to excellent, after several days of anxiety-driven somewhat elevated bp, in a bounce-back that accorded with the delightful Pythagorean Impromptu dream .

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Gigantic cylinders

May 25, 2025

(A good bit that’s totally unsuitable, in subject matter and language, for kids and the sexually modest)

This posting started out on 5/21 as two separate postings, each about extraordinary size, about a thing that caused viewers (me included, in each case) to marvel at its size.

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hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 1

April 29, 2025

👨‍🏭 👨‍🏭 penultimate April: in only two days, a gaggle of rabbits, strewing lilies of the valley promiscuously, will dance around an International Workers pole; be prepared

Meanwhile, Masayoshi Yamada, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics in Shimane University, in western Honshu (author of, inter alia: A Dictionary of Trade Names and A Dictionary of English Taboo and Euphemism), has appealed to me by e-mail on 4/24 with another puzzle from cartoons in English (his last query, reported on in my 9/25/24 posting “This idiom has had the radish”, had to do with the idiom have the radish in a Zits strip). This time it’s about one of Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse strips, (re)published on 6/19/24:


There are three linguistic things going on in this cartoon: the ambiguity of the verb count; the invented -illions words; and the thing MY was puzzled by, the gigantic “nonsense nonce coinage” (as he put it) hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions

After some background words about the strip, I’ll take up these three things one by one, expanding on things I wrote to MY.

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An anecdote

April 12, 2025

… which will plug into two topics being developed in my posting queue (which is totally unmanageable in the face of recent events in my life and in the world): rich people, and the death in January of the Princeton philosopher Paul Benacerraf (who was my senior-year adviser in mathematics). I will have a lot more to say about both of these topics in future postings, but today I’ll just give you the zinger.

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Slices of pi(e)

March 15, 2025

π 🥧 π 🥧 π 🥧 for yesterday (mammoths lumber along majestically, and they are often regrettably late for appointments), 3/14, which was Pi Day in my country, and for some years now, also — delicious pun — Pie Day in many places (so inviting a cascade of formulaic word play: pie in the sky, a piece of the pie, easy as pie, even pie chart)

I’ll jump right into things with a charming and heartfelt Facebook message yesterday from my old friend Paula Stout, who many years ago lived in Palo Alto, but has since moved to the great American Southwest — on a ranch outside Greenville TX, east of Dallas-Fort Worth:

Happy Ecstatic Friday on Pi Day (3.14)

We were in town today, where every store treated the day as a celebration. They were giving away apple pies, chicken pot pies, [pizza pies,] and even eskimo pies. With big smiles, balloons and jubilation.

And it struck me that we are seeing history unfold.

1988 was the first “Pi Day” for a marketing campaign in SF, iirc. Before that, only we geeks and friends of the wonderful Kevin McHargue (who was born on this day) partied it up

And now, here we are. A national holiday of pies!

As David Mamet, renowned playwright, once noted, “We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”

There’s enough stress brewing in the world, y’all, let us pray he is right and there is pie enough to combat it.

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Ai, dem potent operators

February 16, 2025

Yesterday’s Zippy strip manages to combine abstract algebra (in the notion of idempotence) with linguistic behavior (in the notion of onomatomania):

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The year in mathematics

January 7, 2025

I blame it all on Alex Grosu*, who e-mailed me this greeting on 1/2:

Happy New 2025! As a mathematician**, you might like what follows***:

1) 2025 itself is a square: 45 × 45 = 2025
3) It’s a product of 2 squares: 9² × 5² = 2025
4) It is the sum of 3 squares: 40²+ 20²+5² = 2025
5) It’s the sum of cubes, of all the whole numbers from 1 to 9: 1³+2³+3³+…+9³ = 2025
6) Also: 2025 = (1+2+3+…+9)²

It’s the year in mathematics.

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