The Universe of Discourse
https://blog.plover.comMark Dominus's long-running blog exploring mathematics, programming, language, and history through long-form essays with technical depth.
Entries
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The bookshelf by my elbow, the one that I can reach without getting up, has seven books on it, not necessarily the on...
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Previously: Ordinal numbers and basic set theory Ordinals as nim-heaps Nim always ends, even with infinite ordinals I...
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(Previously) Flukes and Breakthroughs In the NBA 2015–16 season, Steph Curry set the all-time single-season record fo...
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Previously: Ordinal numbers and basic set theory Ordinals as nim-heaps Yesterday I talked about the game of Nim, whic...
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Previously: Ordinal numbers and basic set theory We're going to get to in a long and roundabout way. First I want to ...
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This post is going to be about what infinite ordinal numbers are, and about is in particular. I had a brainwave a whi...
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A while back I related how I had been mocked by an English person for using the word “burglarize”. I ended by saying:...
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This is my great-grandfather, born Dominusz Andor in Szeged, Hungary in 1886. In the picture he is in Brooklyn, New Y...
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Making the rounds last week was this magnificent article on the complications of Arabic typesetting, An interactive i...
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While cleaning out my office today, I found this, which I wrote in 1992: In the middle 1970's, the IBM corporation di...
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(Very much previously: Egyptian Fractions) Back in March, I had been reading On the Egyptian method of decomposing in...
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(Previously) In 2003 I visited Barcelona and spent all day wandering around the mighty Basilica de la Sagrada Família...
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The ancient Egyptians had a terrible notation for fractions. They had notations for for each , for , but everything e...
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A couple of years back I was discussing the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (RMP). It includes a table expressing as a sum...
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A couple of days ago I recounted a common complaint: I keep seeing programmers say how angry it makes them that peopl...
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A number of years ago I wondered how many movies I had seen. The only way I could think of finding out was just to ma...
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Something interesting happened at work this week. Our company is going to a convention later this month, and they wil...
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Bo Diddley's cover of "Sixteen Tons" sounds very much like one of my favorites, "Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover". It...
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In a recent article about John Haugeland's rejection of micro-worlds I claimed: as a “Large Language Model”, Claude n...
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(Previously: [1] [2]) Welcome to Philadelphia! We have a lot of political corruption here. I recently wrote about the...