No Conjecture For 19,000

I failed to notice when it happened but my little blog here reached its 19,000th page view sometime on Saturday the 22nd. I’m sorry to have missed it; I like keeping track of these little milestones and I expect to be pretty self-confident if and when I hit 20,000. I know these aren’t enormous numbers, as even mathematics blogging goes, but I do feel like I’m getting a larger audience, that’s sometimes also more engaged, and that’s gratifying.

Since I don’t want to just seem to be bragging about a really minor accomplishment I hoped to include a conjecture that would be a nice little puzzle, following up on the right-triangle stuff done so recently here. But in writing out the problem exactly, I realized that the conjecture I had in mind was (a) false, and (b) really obviously false. Which is a shame, but so many attempts at figuring out something turn out that way. I’m deciding whether to swallow my pride and lay out the line of thought that ended up in disappointment, on the grounds that you never get to see a mathematician go through the stages of discovery only to come up with a flop; that’s not the sort of thing that gets into papers, much less textbooks, unless there’s a good juicy scandal behind it. We’ll see.