For the Leap Day 2016 A-to-Z — it started around Leap Day; I didn’t write everything in one impossibly massive burst — I threw subjects open to nominations. This was a great choice. People ask me about things I would never have thought of. Or that I did not know about before being asked. So I would learn things just ahead of explaining them.
Dedekind Domains, here, were I think the first example of that. It was also the first time I threw out and rewrote an essay from scratch. The first essay tried to lay out all the rules that made up a Dedekind Domain. Which, for an audience I couldn’t be sure had ever heard of rings before, took paragraph after paragraph of definition. When I realized I wasn’t staying intersted in writing this, I understood I needed a different approach. So this essay taught me several things, one of them truly important.
It turns out I don’t have the Leap Day 2016 A-to-Z essays organized by a convenient tag either. I’ll have to fix that too.