All posts (read at your own risk)

• ⏳ Cole factorization story

  Another incomplete draft still to be organized

  2019 March 11 • 15763 words (≈65 minutes) •

• CSS For TeX users -- a teaser

  A universal trick for layout with CSS

  2019 February 06 • 557 words (≈4 minutes) •

• More on the sum of digits of a power of a number

  Followup to -- How often does a number $N$ have some power $N^k$ whose sum of digits is exactly $N$?

  2019 January 03 • 2120 words (≈10 minutes) •

• The sum of digits of a power of a number

  How often does a number $N$ have some power $N^k$ whose sum of digits is exactly $N$?

  2019 January 02 • 1088 words (≈6 minutes) •

• Surely a bug

  For another story about mathematics and software bugs, see here:

  2018 December 08 • 296 words (≈3 minutes) • mathematics, software

• Unexpected application of Lagrange's theorem

  Message from the system at Berkeley, October 2009:

  2018 December 08 • 134 words (≈2 minutes) • mathematics, software

• What happens eventually when you apply the divisibilty test

  Follow-up to previous post, based on ideas someone showed me.

  2018 November 17 • 5289 words (≈23 minutes) •

• Divisibility tests via modular arithmetic

  Using modular arithmetic, and a new trick (found in "Vedic Mathematics"), to finally get good divisibility tests

  2018 November 11 • 3984 words (≈17 minutes) •

• A movie-related personal mystery, and its resolution

  Memory is surprising (also, everything is connected)

  2018 October 13 • 369 words (≈3 minutes) •

• Factorizing numbers using Fermat's method (Narayana's method)

  Fermat’s method of factorization (which should properly be called Narayana’s method; see below) is useful when trying to find the factors of a number $N$ that happens to have a factorization of the form $N = pq$, where $p$ and $q$ are very close to each other.

  2018 October 09 • 1177 words (≈6 minutes) • maths

• What is “science”?

  It appears that the word “science” is used in a few different meanings:

  2018 September 29 • 508 words (≈4 minutes) •

• Math in TeX / Math in LaTeX

  What is known so far (to me at least)

  2018 September 22 • 440 words (≈3 minutes) •

• /CCITTFaxDecode and the actual CCITT (Group 4) decoding algorithm

  TLDR: If your internet searches for “CCITTFaxDecode” don’t give results of much relevance, try searching for “CCITT” along with “group 4”, etc.

  2018 September 08 • 1090 words (≈6 minutes) • software, pdf, image compression

• ⏳ The structure of old PDF files with bitmap fonts

  How were PDFs made by Ghostscript in the 1990s?

  2018 September 04 • 1979 words (≈9 minutes) •

• Notes on the structure of PDF files

  What is inside a PDF file?

  2018 September 01 • 4224 words (≈18 minutes) •

• Processing PDFs with ScanTailor

  Working with book scans

  2018 August 29 • 742 words (≈4 minutes) •

• ⏳ Twitter and me

  The first time I heard about something called Twitter, it was a warning.

  2018 August 15 • 59 words (≈2 minutes) •

• Are Your Lights On?

  Excerpt from Gerald Weinberg's book

  2018 August 09 • 3254 words (≈15 minutes) •

• The Champu Ramayana of Bhoja

  Online resources for this lovely work.

  2018 July 30 • 1012 words (≈6 minutes) •

• My talk on metres

  Talk went poorly.

  2018 July 29 • 549 words (≈4 minutes) • personal

• ⏳ Taking a look at Sanscript

  An examination of the Sanscript library for Sanskrit transliteration

  2018 July 17 • 1420 words (≈7 minutes) •

• Making “speaker notes” bigger in Google Slides

  When presenting from Google Slides, the speaker notes are too small. Here's a fix.

  2018 July 12 • 368 words (≈3 minutes) •

• Some equivalent expressions

  A minor thing: different ways of writing the same sequence

  2018 July 07 • 74 words (≈2 minutes) • maths, short

• Sediyapu Chandogati Chapter 7

  Chapter 7. (Gati and yati -- an examination of yati)

  2018 June 30 • 711 words (≈4 minutes) • sanskrit

• Sediyapu Chandogati Chapter 6

  Chapter 6. (First look at kinds of gati)

  2018 June 28 • 2540 words (≈12 minutes) • sanskrit

• What happens to PhD students after they graduate?

  Statistics are hard to come by.

  2018 June 28 • 1157 words (≈6 minutes) • academia

• Modifying PDFs in Python with pdfrw

  Merging and deleting pages, etc. When "pdfnup" or the LaTeX package "pdfpages" aren't enough.

  2018 June 27 • 659 words (≈4 minutes) • tools

• Notes on versification

  Notes from watching this on Shaale: Shatavadhani Dr. R. Ganesh’s course on Sanskrit versification. Obviously, the cryptic notes below are no substitute for actually watching the videos.

  2018 June 24 • 2254 words (≈11 minutes) •

• Sediyapu Chandogati Chapter 5

  Chapter 5. (First look at kinds of gati)

  2018 June 12 • 1566 words (≈8 minutes) • sanskrit

• Sediyapu Chandogati Chapter 4

  A “map” of Chapter 4. (chandas and padya)

  2018 June 10 • 435 words (≈3 minutes) • sanskrit

• Sediyapu Chandogati Chapter 3

  A “map” of Chapter 3. (Rhythm = gati, not laya.)

  2018 June 10 • 320 words (≈3 minutes) • sanskrit

• Sediyapu Chandogati Chapter 2

  A “map” of Chapter 2. (More on laya.)

  2018 June 10 • 721 words (≈4 minutes) • sanskrit

• ⏳ ಶ್ರೀರಂಗವಚನಾಮೃತ

  Saving for re-reading

  2018 May 29 • 1126 words (≈6 minutes) •

• Archive.org book page image slider selector

  Show part of an archive.org page image

  2018 May 27 • 441 words (≈3 minutes) • blog, software

• ★ Reading "Poems from the Sanskrit"

  Some excerpts from the beautiful book by John Brough

  2018 May 22 • 2011 words (≈10 minutes) • sanskrit

• ★ The distribution of least prime divisors

  How frequently is 3 the smallest prime factor of $2p_n-1$? Etc.

  2018 May 20 • 1033 words (≈6 minutes) • maths

• Sediyapu Chandogati Chapter 1

  A “map” of Chapter 1 of this work.

  2018 May 17 • 1254 words (≈7 minutes) • sanskrit

• Possible way to approach a conjecture about A114897

  Possible way of attacking a conjecture from https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2018/04/15

  2018 April 17 • 330 words (≈3 minutes) • maths

• ⏳ Primes in quadratic sequences (Part 2)

  Computing the proportion of prime values of a quadratic polynomial

  2018 April 14 • 5303 words (≈23 minutes) • maths

• ⏳ Always be writing

  Everything

  2018 April 04 • 14837 words (≈61 minutes) •

• ⏳ TODO -- Put the Panchantantra online

  TODO

  2018 March 29 • 125 words (≈2 minutes) •

• ⏳ Primes in quadratic sequences (Part 1)

  Are there more primes of the form $n^2 + 21n + 1$ than of the form $n^2 + n + 1$?

  2018 March 26 • 1807 words (≈9 minutes) • maths

• ⏳ Reading the TeX program

  Lessons learned, thoughts, advice

  2018 March 23 • 1147 words (≈6 minutes) • tex

• ⏳ Corruption in British India

  Just saving a set of tabs, for later reading

  2018 March 23 • 117 words (≈2 minutes) •

• ⏳ Visualizing the structure of binary files

  For PDF files, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3549541/best-tool-for-inspecting-pdf-files

  2018 March 20 • 38 words (≈2 minutes) •

• ⏳ Links for McDonalds

  I try to avoid anything vaguely “politics”, but also I don’t want to lose my opened tabs. :-)

  2018 March 20 • 101 words (≈2 minutes) •

• Seeing floating-point numbers in Python

  How to see a “raw” floating-point number, etc.

  2018 March 19 • 1117 words (≈6 minutes) • maths, software

• Approximating $\lg (n!)$

  How can we compute the logarithm of the factorial?

  2018 March 19 • 758 words (≈5 minutes) • maths

• “Self-taught programmer”

  I’ve seen many people describe as self-taught programmers. While it is admirable that many people taught themselves programming, I don’t like the term and wouldn’t use it myself, for two reasons:

  2018 March 19 • 245 words (≈2 minutes) • programming

• ⏳ Alternative TeX implementations

  What TeX-like programs exist?

  2018 March 15 • 304 words (≈3 minutes) • tex

• ⏸️Getting started with Jekyll for GitHub Pages

  My attempts trying to read and understand documentation, to set up this blog.

  2018 March 12 • 2183 words (≈10 minutes) • blog, continue

• ★ Why is my Git repo so large?

  A script for seeing what exactly takes up space inside a Git repository itself.

  2018 March 08 • 3099 words (≈14 minutes) • git

• ⏸️Computing Highly Composite Numbers

  Context: Motivated by this question.

  2017 November 08 • 1847 words (≈9 minutes) • maths, continue