14,000


Sometime on Thursday, the 6th of March, it appears I registered my 14,000th visitor to the math blog here. WordPress believes it to be someone from either the United States, France, Germany, Canada, or Australia, which at least covers a respectable number of possible time zones. The number’s a nice, big, round one, which I admit is about all I can think of that’s particularly interesting about it; even Wikipedia figures the most likely things you’re looking for if you look for 14,000 anything is either the ISO specification or an asteroid discovered in March of 1993 and apparently not even named yet. (It’s designated 1993 FZ55.) Well, at least asteroid 15,000 has a name.

Stare too hard at any one statistic, though, and you’ll start to wonder how reliable it is; I know for example that multiple of those 14,000 page views were me, testing neurotically to see whether the WordPress statistics counter was actually registering page views (particularly in the earliest days, when I was less self-confident and was using tags worse). Surely my just loading a page to see if it registers shouldn’t count as an actual page view, but, how can WordPress tell the difference?

Taking the WordPress statistics as if they meant what they purport to mean, though, indicates that apparently the most interesting thing I ever did was forget how to show why the area of a trapezoid was the trapezoid formula. My most-read article of all time is How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw, which is still standing at six by the way; some of the other articles which went into that (like Setting Out to Trap A Zoid and How Do You Make A Trapezoid Right) are also in the top five. All that’s based around working out how to work out a formula for the area of a trapezoid and convince yourself it’s right. For some reason the Reading the Comics post from September 11, 2012 also made the cut (I suppose the date is boosting it there). The early post How Many Numbers Have We Named is also fairly reliably popular.

Some of the most popular from the past year have included Something Neat About Triangles — since that post is only two months old I figure it’s got a good future ahead of it — and Solving The Price Is Right’s “Any Number” Game, which maybe solves the game less than explains why it’s usually a pretty good one to watch. Also popular is Counting From 52 to 11,108, and Inder J Taneja’s fascinating project in producing numbers using the digits one through nine in ascending or descending order.

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