November 2013’s Statistics

Hi again. I was hesitant to look at this month’s statistics, as I pretty much fell off the face of the earth for a week there, but I didn’t have the chance to do the serious thinking that’s needed for mathematics writing. The result’s almost exactly the dropoff in readership I might have predicted: from 440 views in October down to 308, and from 220 unique visitors down to 158. That’s almost an unchanged number of views per visitor, 2.00 dropping to 1.95, so at least the people still interested in me are sticking around.

The countries sending me the most viewers were as ever the United States, then Austria (hi, Elke, and thank you), the United Kingdom and then Canada. Sending me a single visitor each were Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ethiopia, France, Jordan, Lebanon, Nepal, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, Switzerland, and Thailand. This is also a drop in the number of single-viewer countries, although stalwarts Finland and the Netherlands are off the list. Slovenia’s the only country making a repeat appearance from last month, in fact.

The most popular articles the past month were:

• How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw, the attempt to classify how many different sorts of trapezoids there are, something of obvious steady interest to the public.
• The Intersecting Lines, pointing to Elke Stangl’s debate about the center-of-mass problem.
• Florian Cajori: A History Of Mathematical Notations, my discovery that a great book about where mathematics symbols come from is (partially) online.
• Reading the Comics, November 13, 2013, another of those comics roundups, although this one with more infinite monkeys than average.
• Professor Ludwig von Drake Explains Numerical Mathematics, a comic strip I’m surprised to see pop up on the popularity charts, but maybe he’s just a popular Professor.
• Solving The Price Is Right’s “Any Number” Game, a bit of actual numerical experimentation on my part.

And I apologize for not having produced many essays the past couple weeks, and can only fault myself for being more fascinated by some problems in my day job that’ve been taking up time and mental energy and waking me in the middle of the night with stuff I should try. I’ll be back to normal soon, I’m sure. Don’t tell my boss.