Kate, a perfectionist, has published Silence: A Literary History. A friend read the book and found just one typo, on p. 162.

Then last week another friend (Andrew Dancer) read the book and also found just one typo. It was the same item, on p. 162.

According to principles of Bayesian statistics going by names like the capture-recpature method and the Lincoln-Petersen estimator, this is enough information for us to estimate the total number of typos in Kate’s 451 pages with pretty good accuracy. The estimate is 1.

[27 May 2026]

Grudgingly over the years, I’ve more or less made my peace with the use of “fun” as an adjective. “That was a fun movie.” You get the idea.

Mathematicians often speak of “toy problems,” meaning problems cooked up to help one explore this or that phenomenon in the simplest possible setting. Yesterday a well-known mathematician spoke to me of certain problems that were “toyer” than others, and even of one that was the “toyest” of all. This may take me a few more years of grudging work.

[19 May 2025]

Many of these notes, like my Applied Mathematician’s Apology, worry that mathematicians these days are interested in rigor and generality but not so much in solving problems. It was different in the days of Euler and Gauss.

I am also well known — since my “Definition of numerical analysis” half a lifetime ago — for my regret that Wilkinson and other pioneers of numerical analysis emphasized rounding errors so much. Their excitement about rounding errors made our subject, to many people, seem ugly.

Lately I have been startled to realize how these themes may connect. Imagine if the brilliant and charming Wilkinson, instead of talking about rounding errors, had shown his fellow mathematicians of the 1950s and 1960s that numerical analysis was a study of algorithms. Might their descendants today feel a better connection to the subject?

In a note a few years ago, I proposed that Abraham Lincoln may have had a net negative impact by keeping the Union together when it should have split in two. Here I find myself, painfully, proposing an analogous assessment of Wilkinson. I fear he may have accidentally encouraged the secession of numerical analysis from the rest of mathematics when they should have stayed together.

[13 May 2026]

I’ve recently read Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography and also Duffy’s The World as I Found It, about him and Wittgenstein. Russell was so focused, competent, determined, rational! But Wittgenstein, tormented and unbiddable, was cooler and maybe even more brilliant, and it drove Russell crazy.

Hard not to see this as McCartney and Lennon.

For better or worse, I am a Russell, a McCartney.

[12 May 2026]

Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, and since then, the world population has gone up two-and-a-half times. Ehrlich has now died, and I’ve read the obituaries in Nature and the New York Times. Both say he was misguided. “His overemphasis on population growth,” writes Nature, “has not proved to be justified.”

It seems that Ehrlich’s sky-is-falling rhetoric turned many against him, and I imagine I would have reacted the same way if I had known him. Specifically, his predictions of imminent mass starvation and exhaustion of resources have not come to pass.

Global warming, on the other hand, is certainly coming to pass, and having 8 rather than 3 billion people on the planet is one of the reasons. This makes me wonder. Suppose Ehrlich had focused on climate instead of resources. Would today’s obituaries still be speaking of his overemphasis on population growth?

[3 May 2026]