Archive for the ‘Numbers’ Category

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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)

 

Posted in Mathematics, Numbers | 3 Comments »

11/11

November 11, 2024

🎆 🎆 🎆 fireworks for 11/11, the double-lucky day the Great War was over (my parents, now long gone, were only 4 at the time and didn’t remember it; I was just short of my 6th birthday when V-J Day, recognizing the end of World War II, came along; celebrating it on the streets of West Lawn PA is my first clear memory of events in the larger world)

Hard to appreciate now what a gigantic rupture the Great War (beginning in 1914) was; the horrors of its modern warfare came along with those of the Russian Revolution (beginning in 1917) and the great influenza pandemic of 1918, and (as Paul Fussell argued in The Great War and Modern Memory) fostered a disillusioned modernist sensibility, wiping out much of what had gone before.

Then, as I wrote in my 11/11/22 posting “Carousing for St. Martin”:

It’s Armistice Day [commemorating the 11/11/1918 armistice ending World War I] (in the US, Veterans Day), solemnly following on the solemn anniversary of Kristallnacht, but it’s also (as Hana Filip just reminded me) the feast day of St. Martin of Tours: St. Martin’s Day, which has its serious saintly side — St. Martin and the beggar in rags — but is, as well, a day of wild revelling, initiating the winter season. An occasion that, ultimately, inspired a piece of music that is just sheer noisy unbridled fun: the Wine Chorus from Haydn’s The Seasons (aka “Juhe! Der Wein ist da!” from Die Jahreszseiten).

But now about 11/11:

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Posted in Books, History, Holidays, Music, My life, Numbers | 3 Comments »

The phantom on the football field

July 16, 2024

The phantom is a player named Ocho Quatro, who materialized yesterday for an old friend reacting to my posting “The coming duodecfest”, on occurrences of the number 84. I stashed a note about their Facebook comment away, for following up this morning. When Google kindly led me, slantwise, to Chad Johnson. Yes, you have a right to be puzzled by that, just as I was until I read Johnson’s entry in Wikipedia.

So this will be (yet another) posting on the fragility and mutability of human memory, and on associative thinking as providing access to those memories.

But first, what led my friend to Chad Johnson: some facts about the man, from Wikipedia:

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Posted in Language and sports, Memory, Names, Numbers, Psycholinguistics, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Now we are twenty

March 4, 2024

That would be my grandchild, Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky — what a string of names! — who is (decimal) 20 today. For OEAZ on the occasion, this tiny poem:

One score for Opal

Vigesimal 10, the first day of
Her second score —
No longer a teen, now in
Her 20s —
The crowds cheer
Her breakthrough

Now, since I’m irremediably a linguist, a dip into the noun score in games and the measure noun score ’20 years; 2 decades’, which are listed together in dictionaries because, surprisingly, they have the same origin.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Etymology, Holidays, Numbers, Poetry, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

The Introversion Star

June 8, 2023

From Max Vasilatos on Facebook yesterday, her report of a 9-pointed star (you don’t see a lot of them) in a notice for a meeting (the details of which are not relevant here): octagrams with rewards for attending — snacks! prizes! — plus a central enneagram, with the inducement of introvert-friendliness; presumably, no one will be pushed or prodded into participating actively in anything that would make them uncomfortable. Ah, the Introvert, or Introversion,  Star!


(#1) It’s ok, you can just sit on the sidelines and watch (Nora Ephron’s 1970 collection of essays, Wallflower at the Orgy, leaps to my mind)

Now it turns out that a 9-pointed star is a symbol of the Baháʼí faith. But before you get all excited by that, let me remind you that the most neutral of stars, the 5-pointed star — which little kids in my country learn to draw rapidly as “a picture of a star” and which older kids here learn to fold as “paper stars”, especially for Christmas — is also the pentagram, the symbol of Satan and his powers; and that 9-pointed stars could be taken to stand for a vast number of things in different contexts (I’ll provide a sample below), not just for Faith and the Godhood in Baháʼí. The enneagram doesn’t intrinsically mean these Baháʼí notions, or introversion, or whatever; it’s just a shape. It’s Just Stuff, as I’m given to saying. (There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on It’s Just Stuff.)

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Posted in Language and plants, Language and religion, Numbers, Signs and symbols | 3 Comments »

Why not oneteen, twoteen?

March 3, 2023

(Or, for that matter, why not onety-one, onety-two?)

These are questions that kids acquiring English frequently ask, as Ruthie does in this One Big Happy strip:


(#1) Kids are pattern-seeking organisms, and when confronted with a deviation from a pattern, are inclined either to silently, unconsciously, eliminate the deviation in favor of the pattern; or to explicitly lodge a complaint, as Ruthie does here

Ruthie asks a why-question, and there is an answer to it — a complex, fascinating answer supplied briefly for the general reader by Arika Okrent in several places (see below) — but it’s of no use to Ruthie, because that answer is about the history of English, while she wants to know what sense it makes for English to work this way now, and why don’t we fix it.

Alas for Ruthie, the only fair answer to her question is that English just is as it is, and it doesn’t really make sense. Bite the bullet, kid.

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Posted in Child language, Linguistics in the comics, Numbers | 6 Comments »

Ten to one

September 4, 2019

The One Big Happy from 8/7:

Ah, the ambiguity in ten to one, turning on two dfferent uses of to. Ruthie’s grandfather intends one sense, Ruthie gets another (closer to her everyday experience).

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Posted in Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Numbers | 1 Comment »

Numerology

July 3, 2019

On Facebook this morning, from Lisa Cohen in Chicago, this query (lightly edited):

Shapenote friends, am I the only weirdo who does this? When I see a bus with a number from a new to me route, I try to see if I can recall the corresponding tune in the Denson book. This confession brought to you by my pride in recalling that 49B is “Mear” without needing to look it up.

I replied:

In my current life, I don’t see many buses. But dates, dates do it for me. Yesterday (7/2) was Bellevue (72b), today (7/3) is Cusseta (73t) and Arlington (73b). D-Day (6/6) is the wonderful Jordan (First) (66). In the reverse direction, St. Thomas (34b), the standard first warm-up song in Palo Alto, is my grand-daughter Opal’s birthday (3/4, March 4th).

I will explain some of the inside-shapenote stuff.

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Posted in Language and religion, Music, Numbers | 1 Comment »

The 6-fold way

May 19, 2018

A fabulous design from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky yesterday:

(#1) “6-fold” (or: “The 6-fold Way”)

To come. On 6-fold symmetry: snowflakes (natural and in paper), many monocot flowers, Kekulé’s carbon ring for benzene, the major colors of the color wheel (reproduced in the rainbow flag for Gay Pride).

Then on number, color, and gender parallelisms, which will give us 6 as purple and queer. And how the opposition of the secondary hues green with purple in #1 parallels the opposition of the primary hues blue with red (and, in the background of #1, the opposition of the primary hues red with yellow).

And on the name 6-fold way, adapted from the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism and Murray Gell-Mann’s adaptation of the idea (under the name The Eightfold Way) to a theory organizing subatomic particles.

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Posted in Art, Color, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Language and religion, Numbers, Rainbow, Science, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

PE6-5000

August 14, 2016

Chatting last week with a friend about changes in New York city, centered around the demolishing of Pennsylvania Station, the inadequacies of the current building known as Penn Station, and the endlessly unfulfilled plans (perhaps now moving forward) to turn the Farley Post Office into a new Pennsylvania Station. And my friend remarked that he’d been in NYC a few years ago and was astonished to discover that the Pennsylvabia Hotel still had the phone number PEnnsylvania 6-5000 — trusting that that reference would, um ring a bell for me (this only works for people of a certain age, or fans of swing music). So it did, and gave me an earworm for the rest of the day.

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Posted in Music, Numbers, Puns | 1 Comment »

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