The book is elementary, and (as translated by Townsend) is a pleasant read. Much of the book centers around constructing the field of real numbers in terms of the axiomized geometrical constructions. This in turn allows Hilbert to show that the set of axioms is complete. The topic leads naturally to one of the main themes of research in plane geometry in the early part of the last century, which is to consider different algebraic objects and how they can serve as coordinates for different notions of affine or projective planes. The reals can be replaced with an arbitrary division ring, for example. For a projective plane, the most general object is a planar ternary ring, with has a ternary operation that serves as a hybrid of addition and multiplication. Determining the projective planes with a finite number of points is still an open question.

1. How much it sounded like the kind of bizarre model you’d see on Charline on Numb3rs come up with in order to crack the case.
2. That Cosma Shalizi would hate the model, since it’s the kind of a casual use of power laws he regularly criticizes. And here’s his analysis of the paper. He points out that, as in many other cases, a lognormal distribution provides a better fit.

Via Cocktail Party Physics.

It is no inconsiderable degree of reluctance that I decline the offer of any Paper from you. I think, however, you will upon reconsideration of the subject be of the opinion that I have no other alternative. The subjects you propose for a series of Mathematical and Metaphysical Essays are so profound, that there is perhaps not a single subscriber to our Journal who could follow them.

I encourage all journals to adopt this as the standard form letter for rejection.

The computer that hosted Ars Math (which was at a dedicated web-site hosting company) died a horrible death a couple of months ago. For a while, it looked like several years of posts had been lost. They could be recovered by cutting-and-pasting from the Internet Archive, but I found the idea so depressing that I didn’t do anything about recovering the site. Fortunately, we were able to extract the posts from the database anyway. Someone offered to help out with the WordPress hosting, so we’re back online!

At the moment the last couple of years of comments are missing, but we’re still investigating what happened to them.

New Scientist has an article with some interviews. The article’s author also bought this theorem.

Number Line.

(Original here.)