God Plays Dice

Google hits for "Pascal-Fermat correspondence": 3,230. For "Fermat-Pascal correspondence": 206. Does anyone have any ide...

A quick puzzle: say that gas prices hit a record high in nominal dollars. And say they also, around the same time, hit a record high in real...

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy points to arguments in a U. S. Supreme Court case yesterday which used the word "orthogonal" ...

John Cook quotes a definition of "classical", due to Ward Cheney and Will Light in the introduction to their book on approximati...

One of my favorite bad math jokes ever is now in Wikipedia, and no, I didn't add it. Namely, exercise 6.24 of Richard Stanley's Enum...

We say that a random variable X has a lognormal distribution if its logarithm, Y = log X, is normally distributed. The normal distribution...

How come the plural of "simplex", in standard mathematical usage, is "simplices", but the plural of "complex" ...

Samuel Arbesman talks how to get something named after yourself . Of course, he names something after himself -- the "Arbesman limit...

One of my most common typos is "permutatinos" for "permutations". A friend points out that this is quite apt.

I'm taking a break from proofreading a paper. I'm reading it out loud, because I find this is the best way to catch mistakes; it fo...

Is there some connection between the etymology of "theorem" and words like "theology" or "theist"? For "t...

Definitions of "set" (as a noun) in the OXford English Dictionary include: Math. Used variously, as defined by the individual aut...

I had an algebra professor my first year of grad school who would describe groups in which all elements had finite order as "torsion...

When Obama wins is Jason Kottke's collection of people's postings to Twitter that begin "when Obama wins". It appears to ...

What is discreet mathematics? Urbandictionary.com tells us: "Discreet mathematics refers to the subtle study of mathematics. Discree...

Steampunk Moves Between Two Worlds , from today's Monkey Writes. “There seems to be this sort of perfect storm of interest in steampunk...

From Lydia Millet's novel Oh Pure And Radiant Heart , in which Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, three of the chief mind...

Did you know that Eduard Cech (whose cohomology is sometimes denoted by a "check") was Czech ?

At Language Log there's a post about how English-speakers use "open" and "closed", which are not grammatically the ...

Dave Rusin has a list of names of mathematicians which appear in the MSC scheme . (That's the "Mathematics Subject Classification....