The Curious Engineer

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God plays dice

gottwurfelt.com

A mathematician blogs.

Math

’15’20’25
Posts
458 from 8 Feb 2012 to 9 Dec 2025
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
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personal blog
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https://gottwurfelt.com/feed/

2025 3

  1. Halfway
  2. YOU get a leap year! And YOU get a leap year!
  3. Two bits of inauguration math

2023 3

  1. Morrie’s law plus one
  2. Translate “ELEVEN PLUS TWO = TWELVE PLUS ONE” into Spanish
  3. Percentage of songs with parentheses in the title

2022 10

  1. Is Hanukkah’s new moon always the darkest one?
  2. Four points is not enough – the enumerative version
  3. Press will buzz off, or, doubled letters at the ends of words
  4. Four points is not enough
  5. When do the polls close for most people?
  6. Does Game 3 have some special magic?
  7. How many states are south of Mexico?
  8. What are you trying to optimize in Wordle?
  9. Why is a euro close to a dollar?
  10. Rolling the dice

2021 13

  1. Expected number of all-Confederate World Series
  2. Which countries are better at the Winter Olympics than the Summer Olympics?
  3. Products equaling sums
  4. Two dice problems
  5. Rational approximations of logs of small primes
  6. Objects in my house with icosahedral symmetry
  7. STOP POTS POST. SPOT OPTS TOPS.
  8. How many borders between states are there in the United States?
  9. Riddler: a grid of numbers
  10. Critiquing some coronavirus maps
  11. 364 gifts
  12. A couple tidbits of Georgia election math
  13. 2021

2020 21

  1. Applied circle packing
  2. Merry Christmas, y’all
  3. 44 candles
  4. Difference of cubes
  5. Another odd crossword clue
  6. Two-thirds of all Fibonacci numbers are…
  7. Which party will be president if there’s a 50-50 Senate?
  8. Zip codes divide the country
  9. Figuring out when a book was written from the names in it
  10. Sixth notes
  11. Another baseball inequality
  12. Would the 2016 US presidential election result be different if the Electoral College were bigger?
  13. Balancing the centrifuge – a Riddler puzzle
  14. Rainbow cats considered harmful
  15. Twenty-nine
  16. The second derivative I compute every day
  17. How many pieces can a puzzle have?
  18. Will the rest of the hurricane season be worse?
  19. Double (or triple) and sort
  20. How full is the pool?
  21. The smallest non-obvious composite

2017 12

  1. A tale of zloty and forint
  2. The riddle of the number chain
  3. Picturing math
  4. Do people on busier roads get more yard signs?
  5. A sequence of Fibonacci facts
  6. Another Trump dump
  7. 11:57:30
  8. Statistics and damned lies
  9. Luck
  10. Math for humans
  11. A calendar puzzle with some wrinkles
  12. How dangerous was 2016?

2016 38

  1. I made it out of clay
  2. After this year, I can always divide my life into triangles
  3. Time zones and election turnout
  4. How to flip an election
  5. Dressing goes on salad
  6. Use R, vote D?
  7. A proof that π < 22/7
  8. Crossword rundown
  9. One-fifth of Americans what?
  10. Sunset times on Halloween for major cities
  11. Sunset’s too late on Halloween
  12. Ulam, von Neumann, and Monte Carlo
  13. A big move at FiveThirtyEight
  14. Beautiful edition of the Principia
  15. Roundup of the poll aggregators
  16. Hamilton Day
  17. Applied circle packing
  18. Voting
  19. Links for February 22
  20. How many shuffles suffice in Nevada?
  21. Super Bowl babies don’t exist
  22. Links for February 8
  23. Do Super Bowl babies exist?
  24. Super Bowl squares with other moduli
  25. Links for February 1
  26. Thue-Morse and fair sharing
  27. Strings of digits, Mersenne primes
  28. January 25 links
  29. Open Syllabus Project
  30. Snow day?
  31. We’re number one!
  32. Links for January 18
  33. Links for January 11
  34. Logarithmic approximations for Collatz
  35. Powerball
  36. Relatively Prime season 2
  37. Links for January 4
  38. Some properties of 2016

2015 48

  1. A New Year’s time zone puzzle
  2. Springer error
  3. Old books from Springer
  4. Links for December 28
  5. Christmas full moon
  6. Links for December 22
  7. Beards and sample size
  8. Erdős is still publishing
  9. Some Euler
  10. 4s and 9s
  11. Let’s make laysplain happen
  12. 2015 Putnam problems
  13. An application of Bezout’s theorem
  14. Profiles of mathematicians
  15. Battleship calculator
  16. Pak on combinatorics videos
  17. Today in license plates
  18. The hot hand is real
  19. Predicting the values of chess pieces (Bååth)
  20. Hannah and her sweets
  21. The most mathematical flag: Nepal
  22. Today in p-values
  23. Stark and Freishtat on course evaluations
  24. Coo, shiver my sceptre!
  25. Help with social science about science
  26. Various computations of the odds of a perfect March Madness bracket
  27. Distribution of sick time
  28. An approximation of quarterly growth from monthly growth
  29. Math bracketologyology
  30. Worst pi approximation ever
  31. Time zones
  32. Indian food (and wine) pairing
  33. Psych journal bans hypothesis testing
  34. Nate Silver on sports data
  35. Chinese New Year during Lent?
  36. Snow day probabilities
  37. Ranking schools based on hiring networks
  38. Buzzfeed link
  39. Is head weight a constant fraction of body weight?
  40. Men and women making exactly the same (not a post about the pay gap)
  41. Fun with factorials
  42. Blizzard of 2015
  43. A crossword clue
  44. Why everyone seems to have cancer
  45. Convex hulls, the TSP, and long drives
  46. Rich states have Androids, rich people have iPhones
  47. What’s the probability that an n-digit palindrome chosen at random is divisible by 11?
  48. Links for January 4

2014 54

  1. One of these things is not like the others
  2. Links for December 22
  3. Links for December 14
  4. Today I am prime again
  5. Links for December 7
  6. Tied elections
  7. On the nth day of Christmas…
  8. Links for November 30
  9. Parents strongly cautioned for advanced math
  10. Thanksgiving power law
  11. Links for November 23
  12. A temperature puzzle
  13. Links for November 16
  14. Grothendieck
  15. Random sums of sines and random walks
  16. From the “amusing recommendation engine” files: pe
  17. Jeopardy! link roundup
  18. Links for November 9
  19. We always think we’re right, but we don’t think we’re always right.
  20. Index of ignorance, or just innumeracy?
  21. Links for November 2
  22. A place value puzzle
  23. Income inequality, social mobility, and sample size
  24. Polling and the wisdom of crowds
  25. Links for October 26
  26. When to buy airplane tickets
  27. Simulating a bet on a whole series from bets on individual games
  28. Fund Samuel Hansen’s kickstarter
  29. Margins of error on Atlanta-area traffic signs
  30. Links for October 19
  31. State population and area
  32. Election forecasting and big data
  33. Links for October 12
  34. Thoughts on ranking employers
  35. Don’t let your babies grow up to be culinary arts majors
  36. Crystallographers and statisticians
  37. How rare are eighteen-inning games, really?
  38. KDD panel: a data scientist’s guide to startups
  39. Links for October 5
  40. A few links to recent stories on Bayesian statistics
  41. Clustering of bigram frequencies
  42. How weird is it that three pairs of same-market teams made the playoffs this year?
  43. Power laws and wealth
  44. DC statehood, 51-star flags, and models of what will pass Congress
  45. A list of fifteen books that make up Gardner’s “canon”
  46. Language Log on “specificity” and “sensitivity”
  47. Explaining banding in a scatterplot of Goldbach’s function
  48. When does fall really start?
  49. How the 538 model works
  50. A data scientist is…
  51. Change in blackjack odds
  52. Real math hiding in the Onion?
  53. Famous quotes about statistics
  54. Facebook on age gaps in relationships

2013 81

  1. 100 years of crosswords
  2. God plays dice
  3. This week’s best statistics joke
  4. State-to-state migration in the US
  5. Weekly links for November 4
  6. Swapping clothes instead of kidneys
  7. Weekly links for October 28
  8. Cloudflare’s primer on elliptic curve cryptography
  9. Sampling in Seinfeld
  10. Weekly links for August 19
  11. Revisiting Pythagoras goes linear
  12. Weekly links for August 12
  13. Apologies
  14. “A lottery is a taxation upon all the fools in creation” – Fielding
  15. Weekly links for August 5
  16. 34 million pizzas is a massive understatement
  17. Weekly links for July 29
  18. Integer triangles sharing angles
  19. Bad royal baby math
  20. Weekly links for July 22
  21. Distribution of the batting order slot that ends a baseball game
  22. Math of the London riots
  23. The probability of catching four foul balls
  24. Bi-weekly links for July 15
  25. Amazon rankings redux
  26. A quick bound on shuffles
  27. A Russian puzzle
  28. Weekly links for July 1
  29. Should I keep buying gift cards for the discount?
  30. (Bi-)weekly links for June 24
  31. van Hentreyck’s discrete optimization at Coursera
  32. Are Amazon’s rankings Zipfian?
  33. Weekly links for June 10
  34. Customers who viewed this item also viewed…
  35. Weekly links for June 3
  36. That Prudential commercial
  37. QED in the OED
  38. Weekly links for May 27
  39. Diaconis and Efron on the bootstrap
  40. Weekly links for May 20
  41. Eurovision
  42. Half a month’s rain
  43. Recent news in analytic number theory
  44. Weekly links for May 13
  45. Name length and job success
  46. Weekly links for May 7
  47. Weekly links for April 29 (one day late)
  48. Weekly links for April 22
  49. Google Doodle
  50. Weekly links for April 15
  51. Reverse Anscombe
  52. Weekly links for April 8
  53. Pi(e) approximations in practice
  54. Weekly links for April 1
  55. Sampling error in sports and politics
  56. Sum of powers of i
  57. Weekly links for March 25
  58. Two plus two is four
  59. March Madness links
  60. Weekly links for March 18
  61. Pi day
  62. Solution to the gambling machine puzzle
  63. Weekly links for March 11
  64. The return of Dow 36,000, or false extrapolation
  65. Four films by George Csicsery in San Francisco
  66. Weekly links for March 4
  67. Flightstats statistical mumbo-jumbo
  68. Weekly links for February 25
  69. Oscars edition
  70. (Bi-)weekly links for February 18
  71. Simpson’s paradox in the wild
  72. Fractal broccoli
  73. Weekly links for February 4
  74. Super Bowl edition
  75. Weekly links for January 27
  76. Markov chains and skill and luck
  77. Power laws for plant lifespans?
  78. A new dartboard
  79. Weekly links for January 6
  80. The nonsense math effect
  81. Sol LeWitt

2012 175

  1. Weekly links for December 30
  2. Quick roundup of Museum of Math coverage
  3. Something unusual in Congress
  4. Weekly links for December 16
  5. Coursera courses on data analysis
  6. Weekly links for December 9
  7. Steele’s genre list
  8. Weekly links for December 2
  9. Weekly links for November 25
  10. on Monopoly
  11. A paradox of unemployment numbers
  12. Weekly links for November 18
  13. The results of the Presidential election in Pennsylvania
  14. Weekly links for November 11
  15. Weekly links for November 5
  16. Poisson processes appropriate for today
  17. Weekly links for October 28 (one day late)
  18. Weekly links for October 21
  19. A right triangle optimization problem
  20. Older should mean bolder, says Speigelhalter
  21. Weekly links for October 14
  22. Square numbers as products of triangular numbers
  23. Weekly links for October 7
  24. Weekly links for September 30
  25. Weekly links for September 23
  26. Triangular numbers between square numbers
  27. Weekly links for September 16
  28. 10 Turkish lira
  29. Weekly links for September 9
  30. Making Math Matter: Differential equations in action
  31. Mental math: how to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit
  32. Weekly links for September 2
  33. Tuesday, September 4 in Berkeley: “Alan Turing: A centenary celebration”
  34. Weekly links for August 26
  35. Jerry Nelson
  36. Two well-known mathematicians died this week
  37. Weekly links for August 19
  38. Who is Erdos’s youngest collaborator?
  39. Weekly links for August 12
  40. Who wins the Olympics?
  41. What are mathematicians?
  42. Weekly links for August 5
  43. Almost powers of two
  44. Olympic mathematics
  45. Weekly links for July 30
  46. Number of Fibonacci primes
  47. How much waiting time does sub-optimal train spacing on BART cost?
  48. Weekly links for July 22
  49. Fibonacci subset fun
  50. Neighborhood boundaries
  51. Weekly links for July 15
  52. People like to move on weekends, but also the first of the month…
  53. Bitwise set trickery
  54. The rain in Philadelphia falls mainly… when?
  55. Visualizing commute-mode shares
  56. Optimal coinage-system design
  57. Another linkdump
  58. Weekly links for July 1
  59. Perfect tau day
  60. Pairs of cities with the same population
  61. Weekly links for June 24
  62. Turing centenary coverage by the BBC
  63. List of mathematical documentaries
  64. How fast was I going?
  65. Weekly links for June 17
  66. On airline hubs
  67. Jesse Kelly’s P-value extravaganza
  68. How many states have above-average unemployment rates?
  69. Weekly links for June 10
  70. How do departments get their names?
  71. Santana’s no-hitter redux
  72. Spelling and prime factorization
  73. Statwing: dead simple statistical analysis
  74. Urbanspoon’s imaginary geography
  75. Weekly links for June 3
  76. The Mets’ no-hitter drought
  77. What proportion of months contain parts of six calendar weeks?
  78. Internet Problem Solving Contest
  79. Most extroverted cities list
  80. Clustering of college graduates: is it getting worse?
  81. A couple short mathematical films by Cristobál Vila
  82. Weekly links for May 28
  83. Fajita pricing
  84. Amazon’s best-read cities
  85. Weekly links for May 20
  86. A real-life example of a bimodal (or trimodal?) distribution
  87. Sedgewick slides on “Algorithms for the Masses”
  88. Weekly links for May 13
  89. Courses using Alpaydin’s machine learning textbook
  90. OKCupid on gay and straight
  91. A half-baked idea for modifying Scrabble scores
  92. Stanford interview with Reviel Netz
  93. Weekly links for May 6
  94. R tutorial videos
  95. Devlin’s Coursera transitions course
  96. A forgotten psuedorandom permutation on 26 letters
  97. Weekly links for April 29
  98. Probability of lots of twins
  99. xkcd’s table of approximations
  100. Less-than-weekly links for April 24
  101. The average of all fonts
  102. Coursera
  103. A practical question about non-response bias
  104. Cross Validated thread on intro Bayesian statistics
  105. Error propagation for Atwood’s machine, by simulation
  106. Interactive population density map
  107. But Officer, you didn’t see me stop!
  108. Weekly links for April 15
  109. Pink is a real color
  110. “The Joy of Stats” on KQED tonight
  111. A coin-tossing decision problem
  112. Weekly links for April 8
  113. Test Prep Authority’s “Math God” problems
  114. Today’s not-so-astonishing calendrical coincidence
  115. Life lessons in mathematics classes
  116. Krantz’s book on mathematical maturity
  117. Weekly links for April 2
  118. What’s the sales tax rate in San Francisco?
  119. On propagation of errors
  120. Weekly links for March 25
  121. A geographical existence proof
  122. Comments on Johnson’s predictions of Olympic medal counts
  123. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it helps.
  124. A puzzle from James Tanton
  125. A third of my life
  126. Weekly links for March 18
  127. Taking PhD comics too literally
  128. My name is supervocalic
  129. Happy Pi Day!
  130. On the probability of coincidences (but not really)
  131. Taalman and Rosenhouse on Sudoku
  132. Weekly links for March 11
  133. A card trick from Diaconis and Graham
  134. Some questions from the Museum of Math’s fundraiser
  135. Kerrich, Ulam, and the scope of classes
  136. How long does it take to observe that 10 is more common than 9 with three dice?
  137. The probability that seven people have different first initials
  138. Stephen Wolfram’s Reddit AMA
  139. Getting the worst possible score on the SAT
  140. Weekly links for March 4
  141. The new MLB playoff format
  142. I Ching probabilities, from Diaconis and Graham’s “Magical Mathematics”
  143. Are first and last initials independent?
  144. One more leap day thing
  145. Continued fraction day
  146. Why everyone thinks they’re above average, following Schelling
  147. Pythagoras goes linear
  148. Weekly links for February 26
  149. Pascal’s Triangle revisited?
  150. Test design and grade inflation
  151. An answer to a puzzle
  152. Paul Graham, generalizer
  153. A puzzle
  154. Niue standard time
  155. All the president’s men
  156. Mathematicians go drinking – a puzzle
  157. Weekly links: February 19
  158. Zachary Abel
  159. The waiting room principle
  160. Yesterday’s coincidence
  161. Street addresses on the Oakland/Berkeley border
  162. Some statistics on complexity of numbers
  163. A webcomic of romance and math (and some other things)
  164. Are there more dead than alive?
  165. Weekly links – February 12
  166. The birth of the calculus
  167. Vi Hart’s phyllotaxis – with googly eyes! and glitter!
  168. Why do statisticians answer silly questions that no one ever asks?
  169. School shouldn’t be an arms race
  170. An ancient magic trick: il laberinto di Ghisi
  171. Are we all descended from Confucius?
  172. Why are correlations between -1 and 1?
  173. Signal amplification
  174. James Grime’s Numberphile videos
  175. God Plays Dice… auf Deutsch!