The answer to the question in the headline is: Too many. After I wrote about Sudoku a couple a years ago, I thought I had cured my addiction; but I’ve been a shameless backslider.
I return to the subject now, in this public confessional mode, to correct an error in my 2006 column. Citing a […]

Zeno of Elea—the philosopher of footraces that never end and arrows that never reach their target—seems a figure so lost in abstractions and infinities that it’s hard to imagine him living in some particular place and time. But Elea was a real town, a sixth-century B.C.E. Greek settlement on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy. The […]

Two recent notes on the Language Log, by Sally Thomason and Mark Liberman, discuss a nutty book, The Secret History of the English Language, by M. J. Harper. I haven’t read the book, but according to the Language Loggers, Harper contends that everybody has the history of European languages totally backwards. We’ve been taught that […]

Leslie G. Valiant, whose work on holographic algorithms was the subject of a recent column in American Scientist and a brief note here on bit-player, has won the 2008 EATCS Award of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. In addition to the work on holographic algorithms, the EATCS cites Valiant’s contributions of computational learning […]

Ages ago (in blog years) I mentioned some algorithmic ideas for getting passengers aboard airplanes faster, based on a 2005 paper by Steven Skiena and others. Since then, the queue at the departure gate has only gotten longer. Now another preprint on the same theme has landed in the arXiv. This one is by Jason […]

Very likely you already know how to count, but let’s review anyway. The usual counting sequence for the natural numbers starts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, … and goes on for quite some time. Some people prefer to start 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …, but they wind up in the same place […]