Nat's blog

[3/23/2026: At least one person complained that the post was too long (perhaps because of spending too much time watching cat videos), so I had Claude generate a couple of summaries, which I put at the end of the post.

Issai Schur’s orthogonality relations for characters of group representations are surely a mathematical wonder.

My grandfather, Sam Kuhn, married my grandmother, then Minette Stroock, around 1920.

TL;DR 1 stick of salted butter (8 tbsp) has about 1/3 tsp of salt.

I first heard of Hannes Alfvén’s The Tale of the Big Computer when I read George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral.

tl;dr After the NY Times purged some solutions and available guesses back in February, they quietly reintroduced them as available guesses, and they also shuffled around some of the solutions, without eliminating any.

Just about exactly eight years ago, I wrote a series of posts that began with this paragraph: If you’re a psychiatrist (or psychiatric RNCS) in the US reading this, you are almost certainly aware that all of our billing codes changed on Jan 1, 2013.

In the process of looking up John Conway’s “Doomsday Algorithm” for figuring out what day of the week “any” date falls on, I came across Chamberlain Fong’s description of a simplification of Conway’s algorithm that he and Michael Walters came up with, whi…

This internet thing, though.

[This wound up being Part 1 of 3.