Quantum computing gets a lot of attention, but we don’t hear much about quantum mathematics. The very idea is an affront to Platonist thinkers everywhere—those of us who consider the elements of mathematics to be independent of the physical universe. Is the truth of the Pythagorean theorem subject to the same uncertainty as the fate […]

The story about young Gauss and his trick for summing an arithmetic series just won’t stop. My archive now includes 134 versions. Almost all the recent additions were discovered by Barry Cipra. (For a recap on what this is all about, see earlier bit-player postings here and here, or the American Scientist article here.)
I’ve also […]

I watched the spelling bee on TV a couple of weeks ago and was stumped by word after word: aniseikonia, oberek, randkluft, cachalot, schuhplattler, cilice. It’s all enough to send you reeling back to Andrew Jackson or Mark Twain or Winston Churchill or whoever the hell it was who said “I don’t give a damn […]

Among the 250 million Rubik’s cubes manufactured since 1980, how many lie abandoned in a scrambled state, having never regained their original configuration since being taken out of the box? Most of them, I would guess. Now comes word that those cubes might be restored to pristinity with a little less effort. The upper bound […]

Anthony G. Pakes of the University of Western Australia shines further light on the “factoidal” function, discussed earlier here on bit-player and in the May-June issue of American Scientist:
I found your article about factoid(n) very interesting, and I offer you some analytically derived facts about it.
I will denote factoid(n) by f(n). You probably realize that […]