happy 100th, centenarian mathematician Richard K. Guy!

Some mathematicians die young, like Galois, Abel, or Zhitomirskiy. Others are active well into their 90s, like Bertrand Russell, Martin Gardner or Richard K. Guy, the last of which turns 100 today.  I recently remembered an article a couple years back about him walking over 800 steps to the top of a tower every year, and looking it up shows that he did it this year:

From the The Strong Law of Small Numbers to the glider in the game of life, Guy's discoveries (and compilation of the undiscovered, in Unsolved Problems in Number Theory) will be leading to new mathematics in 2116.  Happy birthday, Richard K. Guy!

newspaper roundup

On April 1, my op-ed "The race is on: Uber versus the real sharing economy" ran in the newspaper Jamaica Observer.  And no, that's not an April Fools joke.

In fact, the piece was written all the way back in February, a month in which it appeared in print in both The Des Moines Register (not online, except behind the paywalls of the paper's subscriber archive and the ProQuest academic database) and La Tribuna Hispana (in that paper's own Spanish translation!).  The same month, two of my letters to the editor also appeared in newsprint: "Tests and time" in Queens Chronicle and "Jews Onscreen" in The Jewish Week.