Monthly Archives: February 2010
Herbert R. J. Grosch, 1918-2010
Today I learned of the death of Herb Grosch, proud provocateur and mischief-maker of the computing industry. Anybody who ever knew Herb, however slightly or briefly, has a story to tell, so here’s mine. Grosch held senior positions at major … Continue reading
Posted in computing, modern life
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The teetotaler’s walk
Writing about Pólya’s recurrence theorem led me to pick up Gerry Alexanderson’s book The Random Walks of George Pólya. He tells a sweet anecdote about the origin of the theorem. The random walk is sometimes called the drunkard’s walk, but … Continue reading
Posted in mathematics
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Gruenberger’s prime path
Fred Gruenberger may well have been the first blogger on computational topics. When he was writing, back in the 1970s, there was no RSS, and so he distributed his musings in a monthly newsletter called Popular Computing. A typical issue … Continue reading
Posted in computing, mathematics, problems and puzzles
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Yet another spam update
It seems the great spam tide of 2009 is ebbing. The graph records numbers of spam messages per month received by my email accounts; obviously this is just a personal tally and your milage may vary. The percentage of Russian-language … Continue reading
Posted in modern life
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A molecular millisecond
It was not quite a century ago that we got our first glimpse of molecules. William Lawrence Bragg, with a little help from his dad, figured out how to get molecules to sit still long enough for a portrait. First … Continue reading
Posted in biology
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