Mathematician James Propp writes essays on accessible mathematics, such as primes, number bases, matrices, and mathematical curiosities.
HN links it in math discussions, for example on whether 1 is prime, and one commenter enjoyed a parody piece on it.
A tangent, and (for Dr Propp) suggestion and question:
- Related: https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2023/06/16/what-is-a-matrix/
- May I suggest adding a link to https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/feed/ somewhere more easily found than via "View Source"?
- Since you (a) mentioned a working title "... Adventures of Plus and Times" and (b) have classroom experience, do you have any opinions on the following: when overloading the "high school" arithmetic operators for ring- and lattice-like structures, is it easier for people to learn (a) overloads with traditional use (ie × ↦ meet, + ↦ xor in Electrical Engineering), (b) overloads with mnemonic stories: "product makes things larger; modulo makes things smaller", or (c) any consistent overloads, because just making the abstraction leap is much more difficult than remembering any operator assignments?
I agree, modern definitions exclude 1 since "we lose" unique factorization. It's interesting to note [1] that this viewpoint solidified only in the last century.
[1] https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2025/04/21/is-1-prime-and-does-it-matter/
Similar. But I recently read this parody all the way through and lolled https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2024/09/17/our-fractional-universe/
Found it:
https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2017/08/16/prof-engels-marvelously-improbable-machines/