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| monthly writings in and around mathematics by James Propp

mathenchant.wordpress.com

monthly writings in and around mathematics by James Propp

Math

’15’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
133 from 17 Jun 2015 to 18 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (7 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 6

  1. On Beyond Omega!
  2. Solving the Flat Cube
  3. What Bad Bases Are Good For
  4. Seventeen Camels and Where They Can Take You
  5. Sorry, Mary
  6. In Praise of Stupid Questions

2025 10

  1. Is Matrix Multiplication Ugly?
  2. Picturing Mathematics
  3. Randomness Made to Order, part 1
  4. When .999… Isn’t 1
  5. Remembering Kelly
  6. Math and the Museum
  7. Is 1 Prime, and Does It Matter?
  8. How Pi Almost Wasn’t
  9. Dedekind’s Subtle Knife
  10. The Real Line versus the Fakes

2024 12

  1. When 1+1+1 Equals 1
  2. Can Math Save Your Soul?
  3. Industrious Dice
  4. Our Fractional Universe
  5. Math for English Majors and Everybody Else
  6. When 1+1 Equals 1
  7. Math’s Mutable Rules
  8. Zero-to-the-Zero and the Do-Nothing Machine
  9. “Jewish Mathematics”?
  10. Nine Years of Blogging About Math
  11. Plus and Times Set Free
  12. What “a 96 percent chance” doesn’t mean

2023 12

  1. Vectors from Leibniz to Einstein
  2. Numbers Far Afield
  3. Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance
  4. When Five Isn’t Prime
  5. Math for Your Ear
  6. The Triumphs of Sisyphus
  7. What is a Matrix?
  8. Hamilton’s Quaternions, or, The Trouble with Triples
  9. Seekers of the One-Stone
  10. Unlimited Powers
  11. Things, Names, and Numbers
  12. Denominators and Doppelgängers

2022 12

  1. Beneath (and Beyond)
  2. The Infinite Stairway
  3. Teaching with Magic Paper
  4. What Lovelace Did: From Bombelli to Bernoulli to Babbage
  5. Let x Equal x
  6. Twisty Numbers for a Screwy Universe
  7. The Remarriage of Math and Physics
  8. Good Shurik Grothendieck
  9. Tricks of the Trade
  10. Breaking Pi
  11. The Clatter of the Primes
  12. Bad Soup

2021 12

  1. Numbers from Games
  2. Why Names Matter
  3. Here There Be Dragons
  4. Miracle People: A “Genius Box” Postscript
  5. Reckoning and Reasoning
  6. In Praise of Pedantry
  7. Going Negative, part 4
  8. Going Negative, part 3
  9. Who Needs Zero?
  10. Dividing by Zero
  11. Thoughts from the Outfield
  12. My Life with Aztec Diamonds

2020 12

  1. Children of the Labyrinth
  2. The Positive Side of Impossible
  3. When 1+1 Equals 0
  4. How Can Math Be Wrong?
  5. The Muffin Curse
  6. Math, Games, and Ronald Graham
  7. The Mathematics of Irony
  8. Confessions of a Conway Groupie
  9. Air from Archimedes
  10. The Square Root of Pi
  11. Chess with the Devil
  12. What Proof Is Best?

2019 13

  1. The Null Salad
  2. Let Us Define Our Terms
  3. Guess Again: The Ehrenfeucht-Mycielski Sequence
  4. Sphere-Packing
  5. Calculus is Deeply Irrational
  6. My Favorite Theorem
  7. Mathematical Flimflam
  8. Carnival of Mathematics #170
  9. A Mathematician in the Jury Box, or, “But how should we define ‘intoxicated’?”
  10. Mazes, Puzzles, and Proofs
  11. Flip Your Students, Flip Yourself
  12. Who Mourns the Tenth Heegner Number?
  13. The Magic of Nine

2018 13

  1. Introducing “Thirdsday”
  2. Stance and distance in popular writing about math
  3. Between the World and the Mind
  4. ChipChip: A new sort of sorting
  5. A New Game with Infinity
  6. Knots and Narnias
  7. A pair of shorts
  8. Why Does Exploding Dots Work?
  9. Time and Tesseracts
  10. Who Knows Two?
  11. The Genius Box
  12. Roasting a Dodo and Biking on Mars: The Magic of Dimensional Analysis
  13. On Size, Death, and Dinosaurs

2017 12

  1. The Roots of Unity
  2. Impaled on a Fencepost
  3. The Global Roots of Exploding Dots
  4. How Do You Write One Hundred in Base 3/2?
  5. Prof. Engel’s Marvelously Improbable Machines
  6. Swine in a Line
  7. Reading, Writing, and Rigor
  8. Minus Infinity
  9. More about .999…
  10. Band saw blades, bedbug zappers, rubber bands and me
  11. Three-point-one cheers for pi !
  12. Avoiding chazakah with the Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence

2016 12

  1. Will ’17 be the Year of the Pig?
  2. Breaking logic with self-referential sentences
  3. Going Negative, part 2
  4. Going Negative, part 1
  5. Bertrand’s Ballot Problem
  6. “The Man Who Knew Infinity”: what the film will teach you (and what it won’t)
  7. Sri Ramanujan and the Secrets of Lakshmi
  8. Fermat’s Last Theorem: The Curious Incident of the Boasting Frenchman
  9. The Paintball Party Problem and the Habit of Symmetry
  10. Believe It, Then Don’t: Toward a Pedagogy of Discomfort
  11. When Not to Expect What You’re Expecting
  12. How To Be Wrong

2015 7

  1. “Really Big Numbers”
  2. Erdős for Epsilons: “The Boy Who Loved Math”
  3. Pólya’s Urn
  4. The One About .999…
  5. The Life of Games
  6. The Lessons of a Square-Wheeled Trike
  7. Why this blog?