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``I’m on vacation so I won’t be checking email’’ will sound funny soon. Maybe it already does.

Computational Complexity — 9/15/2025

“I’ll be on vacation so I won’t be checking email.’‘“I can’t be at the meeting since I will be out of town’‘Technology has made it so that:a) You really CAN get email when you are on vacation.b) You really CAN go to a meeting if you are out of town…

Good Reads: The Princeton Companion to Mathematics

Math3ma — 9/15/2025

Next up on Good Reads: The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, edited by Fields medalist Timothy Gowers. This book is an exceptional resource! With over 1,000 pages of mathematics explained by the experts for the layperson, it’s like an…

The Peter Principle, and the unintended consequences of financial work motivation

Crooked Timber — 9/15/2025

You’ve probably heard of the “Peter principle”: that employees get promoted until they reach a job they are no longer good at. And in political philosophy, there is a famous dispute between (the camps of) John Rawls and Jerry Cohen about the…

Sunday photoblogging: Pézenas 1653

Crooked Timber — 9/14/2025

This weekend has been dedicated to the “reconstitution historique” of 1653 in Pézenas, when the États generaux of Languedoc met in what is now a small town but was then the seat of the Prince de Conti. So, a capital city back then and also a place…

A Shadow of Triality?

The n-Category Café — 9/13/2025

The octonions have nontrivial inner automorphisms of order 3. Is this related to triality?

Footnotes to the week: Greek readings

Blog - Logic Matters — 9/13/2025

What have I been reading this week? I finished The Voyage Home, the most recent in Pat Barker’s wonderful series re-imaging episodes from the Trojan War. This time, it’s Agamemnon’s voyage home after the war, and his death at the hands of…

Burrito Monads, Arrow Kitchens, and Freyd Category Recipes

The n-Category Café — 9/13/2025

Adjoint School guest post by Khyathi Komalan and Andrew Krenz

Is Deep Research deep? Is it research?

Crooked Timber — 9/12/2025

I’m working on a first draft of a book arguing against pro-natalism (more precisely, that we shouldn’t be concerned about below-replacement fertility). That entails digging into lots of literature with which I’m not very familiar and I’ve started…

Is the Prob Method `Just Counting’- I say no and HELL NO

Computational Complexity — 9/11/2025

(After I wrote this post Lance tweeted a pointer to a great talk by Ronald de Wolf with more examples, and also examples of quantum proofs, see here.)I was teaching the prob method for lower bounds on Ramsey Numbers (see my slides here).As often…

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 35

The Aperiodical — 9/10/2025

DMFT turns around, and every now and then it falls apart Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in mathematics. I’m tutoring a bit of Further Core Pure 1 this year, and it was quite instructive to do…

My down the back of the sofa theory of the emerging stage of capitalism. Plus, Australian magpies.

Crooked Timber — 9/9/2025

Mr Magpie has always been a bold friend. He sits at the table with us when we are outside. In the warmer months when we often leave the back door open he walks inside the house, sometimes looking for a snack, but often enough walks all the way…

Five technological achievements! (That we won’t see any time soon.)

Crooked Timber — 9/9/2025

I seem to have become CT’s resident moderate techno-optimist. So let me push back a little: here are five things that we’re not going to see between now and 2050. 1) Nobody is going to Mars. Let me refine that a little: nobody is going to Mars and…

A Restless Soul

Computational Complexity — 9/8/2025

When I first became a professor I had it all planned out, I would do research, teach and supervise students, get tenure and do more research, teach more courses, and supervise more students for the rest of my life. But once I got tenure, instead of…

Sunday photoblogging: Trieste (2009)

Crooked Timber — 9/7/2025

Footnotes to the week: Zen painting, the size of sets, Maddy

Blog - Logic Matters — 9/6/2025

Just before we went off to Zürich, we had our house painted outside (the doors, the windows, and so forth). It took fourteen days, not because we have a mansion but because a lot of preparatory work was needed, cutting out minor rot, repairing,…

Occasional paper: It gets on your nerves

Crooked Timber — 9/5/2025

I do these occasional posts about science papers. Some are just for fun. But sometimes — honest! — there’s an underlying connection to the greater Crooked Timber project. This post is one of that sort, because it’s about the limits of…

Review: The Pseudorandom Ensemble at TMiP25

The Aperiodical — 9/3/2025

The number one component of music that really gets my attention is Brian May plays guitar, but a very close second is clever lyrics. The first morning of 2025’s Talking Maths in Public (TMiP) conference, from waking up, through carving myself a…

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 34

The Aperiodical — 9/3/2025

DMFT rocked. Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician, on a renewed mission to spread the joy and delight in maths after a tremendous few days at the Talking Maths in Public conference. I listed some highlights here, and decided that rather…

Guest Post on Why Coding Style is Important

Computational Complexity — 9/2/2025

Coding Style Is ImportantDoes coding style matter? We teach students how to write code and about algorithms. But, do we discuss coding style? Some people may say that style is just personal preference. But, there is undoubtedly good style and bad…

Carnival of Maths 242

The Aperiodical — 9/2/2025

The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of August 2025, is now online at Flying Colours Maths. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical….

The crash of 2026: a fiction

Crooked Timber — 8/31/2025

Looking at the facts, there’s no reasonable conclusion except that US democracy is done for. But rather than face facts, I’m turning to fiction. So, here’s a story about the collapse of Trumpism, crony capitalism and the AI/crypto bubble. Fiction…

Sunday photoblogging: Clevedon pier

Crooked Timber — 8/31/2025

Footnotes to the week: Mellor, Sets, Mozart

Blog - Logic Matters — 8/30/2025

It is difficult to believe that Hugh Mellor died over five years ago: he was a very generous and loyal friend, and still much missed. And I have been thinking about him particularly this week, prompted by Tim Crane’s newly published biographical…

Equivalence via Surjections

The n-Category Café — 8/30/2025

All equivalences are generated by just the strict, literally surjective ones.

When will the sun set on the USA?

Crooked Timber — 8/29/2025

I was recently part of an online discussion that asked this question. People were talking about industry, democracy, civil society, world leadership, you name it. But nobody was asking the obvious question: when, in fact, will the sun set on the…

The Logical Argument

Computational Complexity — 8/27/2025

This will be one of a series of posts that I’ve always wanted to write but I needed to wait until I was no longer an academic administrator.Logic is critical to proving theorems but it’s the wrong way to argue for resources.When I was such an…

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 33

The Aperiodical — 8/27/2025

Double Maths First Thing is at about 3.5/5 on the ready-to-rock-o-meter HELLO $CURRENT_LOCATION! Sorry, hang on, the show isn’t until tonight. Let me switch off rock god mode and try again. Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a…

It’s Not Socialism–It’s National Socialism

Crooked Timber — 8/27/2025

People are wondering how Trump could get away with nationalizing 10% of Intel, with plans to acquire more corporate assets for the Federal government, while hardly hearing a peep from other Republicans. Isn’t this socialism, which is anathema to…

Inquiries-Week 4: Triangulate the Triangle

Fractal Kitty — 8/26/2025

IntroductionIn this inquiry, triangles are dissected into smaller triangles with vertices labeled as either light (L), medium (M), or dark (D). Any triangles that are LMD triangles are shaded with color. Triangle playLet’s start with a triangle…

Review: The Mathematician’s Library, by Thomas K. Briggs

The Aperiodical — 8/25/2025

Books. Every self-respecting mathematician’s floor has a pile of them, some half-read, others to re-read, some merely providing structural support. In The Mathematician’s Library, Thomas K. Briggs considers an alternative approach to the…

Dogs bite men (and a little girl).

Crooked Timber — 8/25/2025

My friend was bitten by a dog this summer. For British readers: being bitten by a dog elsewhere in the world isn’t merely painful, scary and shocking. It brings with it a real possibility of rabies. For non-British reader – really, I’m not making…

Was the George Foreman Grill The Best Invention of the last 50 Years?

Computational Complexity — 8/24/2025

(This post was inspired by George Foreman, who passed away March 21, 2025, at the age of 76.)About 10 years ago I asked my classWhat is the best invention or tech advance of the last 50 years?Here are the answers I got NOT ranked.1) The internet….

Sunday photoblogging: sunflower

Crooked Timber — 8/24/2025

Footnotes to the week: Russians, Venetians, Van Gogh

Blog - Logic Matters — 8/23/2025

It is time to face the book problem again. We had to clear a whole floor-to-ceiling bay of bookshelves so our plumber could drop new pipework down at the back of the bay (long boring story). And we forced ourselves to be selective about what to…

The Cheltenham to Manchester Piccadilly Adventure

Crooked Timber — 8/22/2025

I managed to time things perfectly – I had a conference in Manchester after day one of the Cheltenham festival, which our friend Bob hasn’t missed since 1953, so we all went to see the first day of Gloucestershire v Hampshire (starring Wisconsin’s…

States of Resistance

Crooked Timber — 8/21/2025

Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has been making the case that the states are critical sites of resistance to Trump’s lawless power grabs on the road to authoritarianism. He was challenged today by a reader who asked him what,…

The Phone

Computational Complexity — 8/20/2025

I’ve heard this story from a few places. A father watches Back to the Future II with his kid. The 1989 movie view of 2015 looks entirely different when in fact not much has changed except for the fashion and the lack of mobile phones. This is…

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 32

The Aperiodical — 8/20/2025

Double Maths First Thing is looking forward to the cricket Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing maths, solving puzzles, and feeling really clever about it. This week, we’re planning to…

A few more notes about Tom L

Computational Complexity — 8/18/2025

Tom Lehrer passed away on July 26, 2025, at the age of 97. I wrote a blog-obit here. One of my readers read the post and went down a rabbit hole (or did he?), which lead to a blog post about rabbit holes here. A few more notes about Tom L.1) When…

Safeguarded AI Meeting

The n-Category Café — 8/15/2025

This week, 50 category theorists and software engineers working on “safeguarded AI” are meeting in Bristol.

Total Pixel Space

Computational Complexity — 8/13/2025

Last month the New York Times highlighted some AI generated short movies, including Total Pixel Space, by Jacob Adler that gets philosophical about information, à la infinite monkeys. It imagines the finite number of images and video that contain…

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 31

The Aperiodical — 8/13/2025

Double Maths First Thing feels like this rubber band is getting longer. Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in maths. This week I’m mainly on childcare duty and watching the calendar until I can…

My Tom L post inspired a mathematical definition of Rabbithole

Computational Complexity — 8/10/2025

NICK: I read and enjoyed your blog post on Tom L (see here). I then spent 40 minutes down a rabbithole listening to his music on YouTube.BILL: You call that a rabbit hole?! A while back I spent 3 hours reading questions and answers on quora…

Postcard from Zürich

Blog - Logic Matters — 8/9/2025

Five days in Zürich, mostly to have quality time with The Daughter. Hence more hours have been spent in long lunches and dinners, and strolling, and stops for mother/daughter shopping, than in ticking off the tourist top ten must-sees. Which has…

AI and …

Computational Complexity — 8/7/2025

AI and VacationI’m back from my German vacation. This was my first AI vacation, by which I mean how I used AI to navigate a foreign country. Taking a picture of a hand-written menu board, not just to translate the dishes, but to get a description…

What is a Good Quantum Encoding? Part 1

Math3ma — 8/7/2025

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been learning a little about the world of quantum machine learning (QML) and the sorts of things people are thinking about there. I recently gave an high-level talk on some of these ideas in connection to a…

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 30

The Aperiodical — 8/6/2025

Double Maths First Thing keeps getting bumped to the next room Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread delight and joy in mathematical thinking and practice. This week, the kids are at a sailing course. I’ve never…

(BT) Diversity from (LC) Diversity

The n-Category Café — 8/5/2025

Comparing two mathematical notions of diversity.

Some thoughts on journals, refereeing, and the P vs NP problem

Computational Complexity — 8/5/2025

A guest post by Eric Allender prompted by an (incorrect) P ≠ NP proof recently published in Springer Nature’s Frontiers of Computer Science.For a time, I served as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computation Theory, and in this role I had to…

Carnival of Maths #241

The Aperiodical — 8/4/2025

Welcome to the 241st Carnival of Mathematics, hosted here at the home of the Carnival, The Aperiodical. The Aperiodical is a shared blog written and curated by Katie Steckles (me), Christian Lawson-Perfect and Peter Rowlett, where we share…

Jack Morava

The n-Category Café — 8/2/2025

I hear that Jack Morava died on August 1, 2025.

IFL again, Gödel exercises, Purcell

Blog - Logic Matters — 7/31/2025

I hadn’t planned to return to Introducing Formal Logic just yet. But the last week or so I’ve found myself tinkering with the opening chapters. And, sad to relate, I’ve been enjoying the tinkering. So I might continue doing just that. The first…

Tom Lehrer Passed Away at the Age of 97

Computational Complexity — 7/29/2025

Tom Lehrer passed away on Saturday July 26 at the age of 97. (For other obits see this collection of ten obits here.)He worked in both of my fields of interest: Parody Songs and Mathematics. 1) He got a BA in Mathematics from Harvard, magna cum…

How much money did Francis Scott Key give to have a building named after him?

Computational Complexity — 7/29/2025

UMCP has a building named The Francis Scott Key BuildingSTUDENT: How much money did Francis Scott Key give to have a building named after him?BILL: He didn’t give money. He wrote The Star Spangled Banner.STUDENT: I get it! He left the royalties!…

A Prez Question: Can AI do it? Can you? Can I?

Computational Complexity — 7/28/2025

I am curious how AI or humans can do on the following question.I have listed out the nominees for Prez and VP (Vice Prez) since 1976 and put them in two categories.What criteria did I use?The criteria is about their lives. So it’s not going to be…

Answer to my GROUP ONE/GROUP TWO Prez question

Computational Complexity — 7/28/2025

In a prior post I asked what criteria I used to place Prez and VP nominees since 1976 into two groups. In the book Abundance I read that since 1984 all of the Democratic nominees for Prez and VP except Tim Walz had gone to law school.  I decided to…

The Duflo Isomorphism and the Harmonic Oscillator Hamiltonian

The n-Category Café — 7/28/2025

Can the Duflo isomorphism explain the extra 1/2 in the Hamiltonian for the quantum harmonic oscillator?

2-Rig Conjectures Proved?

The n-Category Café — 7/25/2025

Kevin Coulembier has come out with a paper claiming to prove some conjectures on 2-rigs that Todd Trimble, Joe Moeller and I made.

FHE@PDX 2025

Math ∩ Programming — 7/25/2025

On Monday, July 14th 2025, I hosted a mini-workshop on homomorphic encryption at Google’s Portland, Oregon office. Though Portland is a small city, it’s becoming a hub for homomorphic encryption. Intel and Google both have a presence here, as well…

The Clowder Project

The n-Category Café — 7/25/2025

Announcing the Clowder Project: a wiki and reference work for category theory built using the same general infrastructure and tag system of the Stacks Project.

Tannaka Reconstruction and the Monoid of Matrices

The n-Category Café — 7/25/2025

Todd Trimble and I wrote a paper on characterizing classical groups (and monoids) in terms of their 2-rigs of representations.

Lawvere’s Work on Arms Control

The n-Category Café — 7/25/2025

Did you know that Lawvere did classified work on arms control in the 1960s, back when he was writing his thesis?

Counting with Categories (Part 1)

The n-Category Café — 7/24/2025

First lecture in a 4.5-hour minicourse on combinatorics with species.

Counting with Categories (Part 2)

The n-Category Café — 7/24/2025

Second lecture in a 4.5-hour minicourse on combinatorics with species.

Counting with Categories (Part 3)

The n-Category Café — 7/24/2025

First lecture in a 4.5-hour minicourse on combinatorics with species.

How to Count n-Ary Trees

The n-Category Café — 7/24/2025

How do you count rooted planar n-ary trees with a given number of leaves? Use Lagrange inversion!

Chiaroscuro Quartet and Cédric Tiberghien play Beethoven and Brahms

Blog - Logic Matters — 7/23/2025

At Wigmore Hall a few days ago, a predictably superb concert. Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 in B flat Op. 130 with a (take-no-prisoners) Grosse Fuge Op. 133, followed by the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor Op. 34, with the plangent tones of the…

Trevisan Prize- Deadline July 31 for Notification Intent, Aug 31 for nomination.

Computational Complexity — 7/22/2025

A new prize:The Trevisan Prize, in honor of Luca Trevisan, who died in 2024 (blog obit is here, open problems column in his honor is here), has been announced.  The link is  here. The deadline for notification of intent is July 31 which is…

Frequently Asked Questions about FHE

Math ∩ Programming — 7/18/2025

I work on homomorphic encryption (HE or FHE for “fully” homomorphic encryption) and I have written a lot about it on this blog (see the relevant tag). This article is a collection of short answers to questions I see on various threads and news…

Turing, Wagner, Ruth

Computational Complexity — 7/16/2025

Douglas Hofstadter first published Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid in 1979 and my then high school self tried, and failed, to read though the entire book. It focused on the contradictions, with Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, M….

Historical highlights?

Blog - Logic Matters — 7/15/2025

The first mini Amazon review of the new edition of Introducing Category Theory arrives: five stars. Simultaneously, the first report of a typo (§2.9(b), “its homomorphism needs to be included” should read “its identity homomorphism needs to be…

Poetic serendipity

Blog - Logic Matters — 7/12/2025

I have written before about the pleasure of serendipitous finds in charity second-hand bookshops. It isn’t the matter of saving a few pounds (or of giving the money to a charity rather than a chain bookstore); that’s nice, to be sure, but it…

Take Two

Fractal Kitty — 7/11/2025

Haiku + Codewith a second take dance with the first – tethered massorbiting encores .iframe-container { position: relative; width: 100%; height: 0; padding-bottom: 100%; /* 1:1 aspect ratio - square */ overflow: hidden; …

The Customers of the Academy

Computational Complexity — 7/9/2025

I had an epiphany reading an article in the Trenton Times when I lived in New Jersey at the turn of the century. The article interviewed companies along a certain street lobbying for a new bus route so their employees could more easily get to work….

The New Lower Bound on Busy Beaver of 6.

Computational Complexity — 7/6/2025

We denote the busy beaver function by BB.BB(n) is the max time a Turing machine of size n takes to halt on the empty string.(A particular model of TM and a notion of size has become standardized.)BB(n) grows faster than any computable function….

Inquiries-Week 3: Reflect and Rotate

Fractal Kitty — 7/3/2025

IntroductionExplore the reflection and rotation of polygons to discover the patterns that emerge. Polygon PlayLet’s start with a triangle ABC. We can rotate clockwise so that each vertex moves clockwise by one step: We can also reflect (or flip)…

A Professor Again

Computational Complexity — 7/2/2025

A new dean has taken my place, and I have returned to the professoriate at Illinois Tech, ending thirteen years in administration, six as dean and seven as department chair at Georgia Tech. I won’t rule out more administrative roles in the future,…

Srivastava on Naive Set Theory

Blog - Logic Matters — 7/1/2025

In a previous book note, and also in the Appendix to the Guide, there is a review of Shashi Mohan Srivastava’s earlier A Course on Mathematical Logic. Parts of that book, as I say, could make useful supplementary/revision reading. So I was…

Two high school students have a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem / Pythag theorem older than thought

Computational Complexity — 7/1/2025

(I wrote this post a while back so its no longer NEW. More important— if there has been a follow-up to the story that is not in my post, let me know.)   We have something NEW and something OLD about the Pythagorean Theorem. Now all we need is…

The Distribution of Prime Numbers: A Geometrical Perspective

Computational Complexity — 6/26/2025

Alberto Fraile and Daniel Fernández guest post on random walks generated by the distribution of prime numbers.In our recent papers, we explored the sequence of prime numbers by defining “random walks” governed by simple algorithms applied to their…

If you do well in the UMCP HS Math Competition you may win $1,000,000

Computational Complexity — 6/23/2025

The Univ of MD at College Park holds a HS Math Competition every year. At the reception for the winners Professor Larry Washington points to many past people who did well on the exam. Two stand out for different reasons:1) Serge Brin did well on…

TfE: On Post-Searlean Critiques of LLMs

DEONTOLOGISTICS — 6/22/2025

Here’s a recent thread on philosophy of AI from Twitter/X, in which I address rather popular arguments made by Emily Bender and others to the effect that LLM outputs are strictly speaking meaningless. I think these argument are flawed, as I explain…

Fulbright Memories

Computational Complexity — 6/18/2025

As the entire Fulbright board resigned last week and as the program that promotes international visits for US researchers, and vice-versa, may not survive the Trump administration, I thought I would recount some memories from my Fulbright…

Inquiries-Week 2: Modular Fibonacci

Fractal Kitty — 6/3/2025

IntroductionIn this activity, we’ll explore patterns by finding the remainders when Fibonacci numbers are divided by other numbers.ModuloSometimes, the most interesting part of dividing numbers is what’s left over—the remainder. This is where…

Monad

Abuse of Notation — 5/27/2025

title: A monad layout: microblog category: microblog tags: programming haskell — A monad is when you know how to convert $M (M a)$ to $M a$, but not $M a$ to $a$.

The level of progress in programming language design

Abuse of Notation — 5/27/2025

The level of progress in programming language design: Shortly after the first ever programming language was created, it’s author said that the language’s whole paradigm is flawed and we should do functional programming instead*. That was 46 years…

I want to forget

Abuse of Notation — 5/27/2025

I want to forget Gaza. I want to forget the pain. I want to forget all dumb jokes, old song lyrics. I want to forget that most things ever happened, as remembering makes everything tedious. Forces you to become a bureaucrat of your memories, to…

Love

Abuse of Notation — 5/27/2025

Every time you eat mushrooms, I have to try them too. Cause, if the mushrooms turn out to be poisonous and you die of slow and painful dead, I will die as well. I once dreamed that I was dying, You were beside me, I turned to you and said, “I don’t…

The road I walk

Abuse of Notation — 5/27/2025

The road I walk is new. It’s made not of stone, but dirt. There are no road signs yet. And no bridges to cover the rivers. The road I walk is new, so people think that it is hard. “How do swim?” “Don’t you get dirty?” “How do you cope with all that…

Walk

Abuse of Notation — 5/27/2025

Out for a walk I let go and let the city dissolve me.

Using Automorphism Groups of Curves to Control the Slopes of their Jacobians

Good Fibrations — 5/23/2025

I’ve felt for a long time that automorphisms of curves should control or at least exert serious force on the slopes on their Jacobians. Symmetry forces height, as I’ve written about previously in Models of Formal Groups Laws of Every Height, and…

Inquiries-Week 1: Circle Shading

Fractal Kitty — 5/20/2025

This is the first of a series of guided inquiries in math. If a document is preferred over a blog post, the pdf file is below:Inquiries-Week 1_ Circle ShadingInquiries-Week 1_ Circle Shading.pdf615…

Leibniz’s Dream and Dijkstra’s nightmare

Math ∩ Programming — 5/13/2025

I was inspired to browse some of Edsger Dijkstra’s essays today, and came across his speech, “Under the spell of Leibniz’s Dream”. It’s the sort of personal history I love to read, which gives one person’s sense of the world over a period of…

My Graduate Career in Math

Math ∩ Programming — 5/12/2025

Editor’s note: This essay was originally published on Medium on 2016-03-05. I have made minor edits in this republishing and added a few small retrospective notes. 2010–2011 (Year 0) I had just switched my major at Cal Poly State University from…

China and I

Proses.ID — 4/18/2025

lately I’ve been watching a lot of videos on YouTube about China. it’s partly due to all the chaos around Trump’s tariff, but mostly these…

HEIR talk at FHE.org

Math ∩ Programming — 4/15/2025

Last month I gave a talk on the HEIR compiler project at the FHE.org conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. The video is on YouTube now, and the slides are public. I plan to write more about HEIR in the coming months, because it’s been an exciting and…

238th Carnival of Mathematics

Fractal Kitty — 4/4/2025

Wow! It’s the 238th Carnival of Mathematics organized by Aperiodical. This has been a fun month with lots of submissions and lots of beautiful math art. To start let’s jump into the number 238 itself.238 is: 2 × 7 × 17.the sum of the

A small Haskell task

Abuse of Notation — 4/3/2025

Haskell is great. And I want more people to know it, so this is just a quick overview of it’s capabilities, using the code to solve a simple task I saw on Mastodon. The task is the following: Return a list of all combinations (i.e. order doesn’t…

Does Baby Have Hat

Math ∩ Programming — 4/1/2025

It’s April Cools! Last year I wrote about parenting, in 2023 about friendship bracelets. and in 2022 about cocktails. This year it’s a bit of a meandering stroll through some ideas around mutual aid and self-reliance. Maternity wards If you walk…

Time at the Recurse Center

Fractal Kitty — 3/25/2025

In January, I kicked off a journey of reflection and growth at the Recurse Center (RC) – a retreat where you work at the edge of your abilities with wonderful peers to pair program, study with, and grow. My goals in participating were to learn and…