A Whimper...

 “This is the way the world ends 

Not with a bang but a whimper.”

                      — T. S. Elliot 

…and so too blogs can end with a whimper! Today would mark the 12th anniversary for this blog (that I had originally intended to do for about 6 months)… were it but active. But at the end of March I'd planned to take a few days off from math… which turned out to be pleasurable enough to extend to a week… and then, I just remained too busy with so many other things (...and Wordle) that I decided to use that time for other matters in this busy, busy, and political year. Blog posts had merely been limping along anyway ever since pre-covid. 

But did want to let readers know I be alive, not yet in purgatory, and simply filling time with pursuits other than math, though still on Twitter and always the possibility (however unlikely) of returning to the blog at some future date... you know, when they prove the Riemann Hypothesis.

Support For Young Ukrainian Mathematicians

 Good news from MIT:

https://news.mit.edu/2022/yulias-dream-support-ukrainian-students-mathematics-0330

One of the Odder Posts I've Read in Quite Awhile!

 Of Erdös numbers and.... well, read it for yourself:

https://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/2022/03/weird-ways-to-improve-your-erdos-number/

Of Textbooks, Statistics, and the Real World

 via Gelman:

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/03/27/the-examples-you-see-in-the-textbooks-are-not-representative-of-the-sorts-of-problems-you-see-in-the-real-world/

A Post From Pi Day

 "If our world presently stops existing, 7817924264 will be the last digits of  that we know."

https://rjlipton.wpcomstaging.com/2022/03/14/are-these-the-last-digits-of-pi/

"Emergence" in mathematics....

Flipped Learning... an Update

 Robert Talbert with an update on flipped learning:

https://rtalbert.org/flipped-learning-extinct-or-endemic/

Interesting Geometry from Futility Closet

 Of points, planes, and spindles:

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2022/03/10/the-seven-spot-problem/

New Month, New Carnival of Math

 We can all probably use a carnival right about now:

https://fractalkitty.com/2022/03/02/the-202nd-carnival-of-mathematics/

Puzzletime

 Here’s a puzzle I’ve lifted from THIS blog (who got it from Facebook poster Millie Johnson):

Arrange the digits 0‑9 into a ten-digit number such that the leftmost n digits comprise a number divisible by n. For example, if the number is ABCDEFGHJK, the three-digit number ABC must be divisible by 3, the five-digit number ABCDE must be divisible by 5, and so on.

answer below:

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3816547290

Girls' Angle Bulletin....

 Some current reading material:

https://girlsangle.wordpress.com/2022/02/28/girls-angle-bulletin-volume-15-number-3/

LET FREEDOM RING....

 

...and Addendum:

"Crap" in Science....

 Wow!... this isn't focused on math per se, but no doubt there is math included in the subjects referenced in this piece (H/T to Ivan Oransky):

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/how-much-published-crap-will-we-put

February Math News (including developing story on July ICM meeting in St. Petersburg)

 A nice wrap-up of mathematical news bits for February, from The Aperiodical:

https://aperiodical.com/2022/02/aperiodical-news-roundup-february-2022/

Statistics Lexicon... of a sort

 An old, but still handy, statistical primer I just ran across, courtesy of Gelman:

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2009/05/24/handy_statistic/

The Math3ma Institute

 From Tai-Danae Bradley, The Math3ma Institute:

https://www.math3ma.com/blog/introducing-the-math3ma-institute

If Logic Is Your Daily Joy

 In case you enjoy twisting your brain in knots:

https://josmfs.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Heron-Suit-Problem-201001.pdf

Those Befuddling Primes...

 Jim Propp muses about the nature of the primes:

https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2022/02/16/the-clatter-of-the-primes/

Midweek ASMR

 Haven't posted an ASMR video for a bit, so here's a recent Turkish head & body massage one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTeTf9hUNMk

Double, Double Toil and Trouble; Fire Burn, and Cauldron Bubble... The AMR

 Michael Harris stirs the pot (...the Association for Mathematical Research):

https://siliconreckoner.substack.com/p/news-flash-is-the-amr-really-the

Start The Week Off With Grant and... of course Wordle

 Lest you miss it, Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown) has entered the Wordle fray now:

https://twitter.com/3blue1brown/status/1490351572215283712

[Less empirically, I wrote a little about Wordle less than a week ago HERE.]

One thing I'm not completely clear on, BTW, is when many of these recent pieces analyzing Wordle talk about "letter frequency" is whether they are simply employing well-published figures for letter frequency in English, or are they in fact using (as they ought be) letter frequency specifically in 5-letter words, as easily computable from the Wordle corpus of use? I would expect those two figures to be similar but not the same, and hopefully they are using the latter.

Also, there's tremendous emphasis placed on first word choice in the game, and more and more second word choice seems key to me for winning in 3 to 4 guesses. At least I'm finding increasingly that I can generally get the target word in 4 tries almost regardless of my first word choice so long as I spend enough analysis time on my 2nd and 3rd choices. Certain first word options simply incrementally increase the chance of 3rd guess winners.

It would be interesting to actually run a competition between some real word-maven aficionados (who have a "feel" for the game) versus some strictly (brute force) algorithmic programs and see who would achieve best scores (no time limit), and by what amount.