The National Academy of Sciences has decided to recognize a “paper of the year” published in its Proceedings. Surprisingly, the first paper to be anointed in this way is by a student. Even more surprising, it’s a mathematical paper. Why should these facts surprise me? Not because I think student mathematicians are unlikely to do […]

Every morning I go fishing in the arXiv. Or at least that’s the way I’ve been thinking about this daily ritual: I cast my net over the waters and look to see what strange and wonderful creatures I’ve brought up from the deeps. Today it hit me that I have the metaphor backwards. I’m the […]

The invention of the puzzle we now call Sudoku is generally credited to Howard Garns, an architect from Indianapolis. His first puzzles, which were known then as Number Place, were published in 1979. But now a curious precedent has turned up. More than 20 years earlier, in the 1950s, W. U. Behrens of Hannover, Germany, […]

Luna B. Leopold, the foremost American student of rivers and the landscapes they create, died February 23 at age 90. I never met him, but I’ve been a follower and a fan of his work, which I first encountered in 1966, when Scientific American published an article titled “River Meanders,” by Leopold and W. B. […]

But now I’m back, and the announcement you are reading at this moment should be followed—or is it preceded?—by several more posts in short order.
Actually, to tell the truth, I’ve gone nowhere geographically, but I’ve been busy finishing a column for the next issue of American Scientist.
I’ve been away for a couple of weeks.
I need […]

I used to play hooky at the library. That tells you what kind of reckless, rebellious youth I was. When I skipped school, I would take the subway downtown and spend the day in the sunstruck Science and Industry room of the Free Public Library of Philadelphia. Another time, at the end of my junior […]