My monthly column for the Mathematical Association of America
ANNOTATED INDEX TO ALL POSTS
THE ARCHIVE contains copies of my monthly posts for each year from January 1996, when the blog started (back then they were called “columns”) until July 2011, when the MAA moved their online operations onto a commercial blog platform. (The posts in the archive appear in chronological order—unlike the two more recent live sites, which are most-recent first.)
* WHY THIS ARCHIVE? In the course of an upgrade to the MAA website in the Fall of 2023, all the posts from the first post in January 1996 through to July 2011 were lost. Fortunately, I still had the files I submitted to the MAA each month for publication. Since those are, for the most part, HTML files (that’s how we did it back then!), I was able to reproduce those posts here almost exactly as they would have appeared (apart from page-style issues). [The first year, 1996, was an exception, as explained in the 1996 archive.] What has been lost are any editorial changes to each post made by the MAA Online editor at the time (usually minor), and any corrections I made after publication. Some of those may have been somewhat substantive, though hopefully not corrections to major-league-bad factual errors. Also, as the series developed over time, posts started to have accompanying photographs. On a few occasions, I still had the source images and could include them in these archive posts. But many have been lost.