Update

I put up a post over at the StackOverflow blog describing a little of what I’ve been up to this summer. Curiously enough, the Zipf distribution which shows up in that post is the same as the zeta distribution that shows up when trying to motivate the definition of the Riemann zeta function. I’m sure [...]

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“MathUnderflow” now in public beta

The new StackExchange math site has finally gone out of private beta. I would like this site to succeed, and I had forgotten how much fun it is to actually be able to answer questions, so I hope everything works out. Come on over!

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Nationals 2010

MIT is hosting the United States Rubik’s Cube Championships this summer, August 6-8. All ages welcome! Normally I wouldn’t post about such things, but I happen to be a member of the Rubik’s Cube club here, and Some people use the Rubik’s cube group to motivate group theory. I’m a fan of hands-on mathematics, and [...]

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Update and bleg

Sorry for the lack of updates! I’ll try to get back to commutative algebra at some point, but real life has been intervening a lot lately. In the meantime, I’d like to shamelessly ask that my readers help me out on some unanswered questions of mine on Math Overflow: Modular curves of genus zero and [...]

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GILA IV: The unreasonable effectiveness of generating functions in the combinatorial sciences

We’ve got everything we need to prove the Polya enumeration theorem. To state the theorem, however, requires the language of generating functions, so I thought I’d take the time to establish some of the important ideas. It isn’t possible to do justice to the subject in one post, so I’ll start with some references. Many [...]

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