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 Fibonacci sequence is so-called because in Western mathematics is first appears in connection with a problem from...
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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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Yesterday I reported about how much I despise home repair, how I feel I'm really bad at it, how it sometimes goes ter...
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[ Content warning: mundane, rambly, neurotic. ] A couple of years back I wrote a long whiny blog article about puttin...
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Lately I've been reading Orwell's collected work from 1945–1950, which was being deaccessioned from the library. It o...
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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: Ordinal numbers and basic set theory Ordinals as nim-heaps Nim always ends, even with infinite ordinals I...
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In mathematical study there are two kinds of theorems, which serve very different purposes. Math instruction follows ...
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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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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...