I’m Looking For The Final Subjects For My 2019 A-To-Z

And now the most challenging part of doing an A to Z series: the time after the end of Daylight Saving, when I absolutely positively have to have my final copy ready to go at 1 pm, rather than 2 pm. I’m looking for nominations for what to write about for the last half-dozen letters of the alphabet.

These letters do include X. There’s no getting around that. After about two iterations of this the choices for ‘X’ I was running out of candidates on Mathworld’s dictionary of topics. Last year I opened up ‘X’ as a wild card topic, taking subjects from other letters. It’s just coincidence that we then went with ‘extreme’, like it was the 90s or something.

And I do thank everyone who makes a suggestion. As much as I sometimes feel crushed by the attempt to write two 800-word essays that both blow up to 1900 words each week, they get me to learn things, and to practice thinking about things, and that’s such fantastic fun.

Please nominate topics in comments here. I have a better chance of keeping nominations organized if they’re all together. Also please, if you do suggest something, let me know if you have a blog or YouTube channel or Twitter or Mathstodon account, or even a good old-fashioned web site, that you’d like to show off. I do try to credit ideas and let folks know what the people who give me ideas are doing that’s worth showing off, too.

Art by Thomas K Dye, creator of the web comics Projection Edge, Newshounds, Infinity Refugees, and Something Happens. He’s on Twitter as @projectionedge. You can get to read Projection Edge six months early by subscribing to his Patreon.

Here’s the essays I’ve written in past years for the letters U through Z.

U.

• Unbounded (Summer 2015)
• Uncountable (Leap Day 2016)
• Unlink (End 2016)
• Ulam’s Spiral (Summer 2017)
• Unit Fraction (Fall 2018)

V.

• Vertex (graph theory) (Summer 2015)
• Vector (Leap Day 2016)
• Voronoi Diagram (End 2016)
• Volume Forms (Summer 2017)
• Volume (Fall 2018)

W.

• Well-posed Problem (Summer 2015)
• Wlog (Leap Day 2016)
• Weierstrass Function (End 2016)
• Well-Ordering Principle (Summer 2017)
• Witch of Agnesi (Fall 2018)

X.

• Xor (Summer 2015)
• X-Intercept (Leap Day 2016)
• Xi Function (End 2016)
• X (Summer 2017)
• X-TREME! Value Theorem (Fall 2018)

Y.

• Y-Axis (Summer 2015)
• Yukawa Potential (Leap Day 2016)
• Yang Hui’s Triangle (End 2016)
• Young Tableau (Summer 2017)
• Yamada Polynomial (Fall 2018)

Z.

• Z-transform (Summer 2015)
• Z-Score (Leap Day 2016)
• Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms (End 2016)
• Zeta Function (Summer 2017)
• Zugzwang (Fall 2018)

Advertisement