Showing all posts about mathematics
Is coincidence not coincidence but something else?
27 June 2026
George Musser, writing for Nautilus, ponders the nature of coincidence, particularly the more “out there” instances. Read about his repeated encounters with another backpacker, as he travelled — solo — in Africa some years ago.
I could probably write at length on this topic. For instance…
A few years ago, someone whom I will refer to as Mick, was residing in the apartment building where I stay when we are in Sydney.
We would often stop for a chat if we bumped into each other at the door of the building, or in the hallway. Mick had arrived in Australia a few months earlier, and was looking for both work, he’s a chef, and a larger apartment, as his wife and daughter were joining him later.
He eventually found a job and somewhere to live, and moved out. I saw him just before he left. He asked if I could message him, should any mail arrive for him, and left me his phone number.
We exchanged a few text messages in the months following, but after a time ceased communicating. About five years later, some mail arrived for him. The building manager, who assumed the role after Mick’s time, had left it on the console in the foyer.
It was from a car dealership. Mick had also mentioned before moving out, he was buying a car. I decided not to bother Mick with the news of this letter. I wrote “return to sender” on the envelope, and when I went out later that day, dropped it in the post box along the road.
I came home a few hours later, and decided to log into Facebook. It was something I only did every few days at that stage. It’s hardly ever now. On opening Facebook though I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a friend request from Mick.
The request was only a few hours old, and he must’ve sent it at almost the same instant I was putting the letter that had arrived for him in the post box. I didn’t share that news with Mick, but was astonished, to say the least, at the timing of his friend request.
In my view, as intriguing as coincidence can be, coincidence is coincidence. It’s random, there’s no force of some sort in the universe lining up curious happenings to bemuse and baffle us. Things just happen. This of course doesn’t make any given coincidence, particularly the seemingly weirder ones, any less magic. Provided that is, they’re a pleasant sort of concurrence.
Incidentally, Mick had studied in Australia about twenty-years earlier, and on the flight here back then, had met the woman whom he later married. So I suppose there is that.
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mathematics, psychology, travel
The birthday effect: you are somewhat likely to die on your birthday
12 May 2025
The birthday effect is a thing it seems. Russell Samora, writing for The Pudding crunches the numbers. It looks like quite a few people expire on their “special day”.
Why is there a birthday effect at all? One popular idea centers on the psychological impact of death postponement versus anniversary reaction: Does the looming birthday cause people to postpone death until after they’ve celebrated their special day, or does the birthday itself somehow trigger mortality?
I’ve never liked birthdays, and now I know why…
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The 2022 Fields Medals for excellence in mathematics
6 July 2022
And now for something a little different… Maryna Viazovska, James Maynard, June Huh, and Hugo Duminil-Copin, have been named recipients of the 2022 Fields Medals, which recognise outstanding mathematical achievement. The Fields Medals are only awarded every four years, to mathematicians under the age of forty, by the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union.
I suck at maths, I truly do. I need a spreadsheet to reconcile my budget to buy cups of coffee. But I was impressed by the work undertaken by the 2022 recipients. Hugo Duminil-Copin was commended for “solving longstanding problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions in statistical physics, especially in dimensions three and four.”
That made some sense, up until the word phase.
Maryna Viazovska’s work also sounds outstanding: “for the proof that the E8 lattice provides the densest packing of identical spheres in 8 dimensions, and further contributions to related extremal problems and interpolation problems in Fourier analysis.”
No, sorry, I didn’t get a single word of that. Thankfully though there are people in the world who understand these sorts of things.
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An equation that goes looking for love in all the optimal places
6 October 2011
We know money can’t buy love, but can an equation help you find it… or are some things best left to chance? Whatever, Michael Trick has devised a formula:
Despite these handicaps, if you know how many candidates there are, there is a simple rule to maximize the chance of finding the best mate: sample the first K candidates without selecting any of them, and then take the first subsequent candidate who is the best of all you have seen. K depends on N, the total number of candidates you will see. As N gets big, K moves toward 1/e times N, where e is 2.71… So sample 36.9% of the candidates, then take the first candidate who is the best you have seen. This gives a 36.9% chance of ending up with Ms (in my case) Right.
Originally published Thursday 6 October 2011, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
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