Forgive me if this story is slightly stale. I meant to write it two weeks ago, but for some reason I kept putting it off.
A paper titled “Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators” has been posted on the computer-science section of the arXiv. The authors are Michael A. Bender (Stony Brook University), Raphaël Clifford (University of Bristol) […]
Three readers (so far) have called my attention to errors in “The Semicolon Wars,” my latest American Scientist column.
First, I referred to the programming languages ML, Haskell and Miranda as “pure” functional languages. ML doesn’t belong in that group. Although it is a language that has deep roots in the functional-programming community, ML allows assignment […]
The July-August issue of American Scientist is just up on the Web. My Computing Science column in the new issue is a grumpy, ill-tempered diatribe about the overproliferation of programming languages—and about the grumpy and ill-tempered bickering between advocates of various languages, which often sounds to me like the posturing of TV wrestlers promoting their […]
A few weeks ago I commented on the discovery of some curious precursors of Sudoku, drawn up in the 1950s as designs for agricultural experiments. Now even earlier antecedants of the puzzle have been discovered by Christian Boyer, a specialist in recreational mathematics. Writing in the French magazine Pour la Science, Boyer describes and reproduces […]
The ABC Evening News ended today’s broadcast with a riff on the date—06/06/06. We heard about a 6-pound, 6-ounce newborn, and a 66-year-old man celebrating his birthday. I’ve always been a little perplexed by this fascination with 666. The book that started it all (Revelation, or The Apocalypse of John) was written a full millennium […]
Well, can you? And can you prove it? Peter G. Doyle and John Horton Conway can. In a 35-page article posted to the arXiv last week they write:
In this paper we show that it is possible to divide by three. Specifically, we prove that for any sets A and B, if there is a […]