Thirty letters in my name

I've lived in Massachusetts for 8 years now, and I've always been struck by the density and variety of trees here – maples, oaks, ...

Is probabilistic analysis of any use in analyzing text – sequences of letters or sequences of words? Can a computer generate meaningful se...

The Indian subcontinent is well known for its spices, and one of its stellar contributions is the ubiquitous  black pepper . Native to Sout...

First published over at 3 Quarks Daily . ___ I finished reading  War and Peace  recently. It took me three years but I did try to read i...

Exploring the Memoryless property of the Exponential Distribution. Cross posted over at 3 Quarks Daily . 1. Waiting For the Next Custo...

I was reminded of the    traveling salesman problem  ( TSP) in an unlikely context, thanks to a display at the New York State Museum in ...

Latest 3 Quarks Daily column is about my healthcare-themed trip to Cuenca, Ecuador last October. Full essay is here . This is how it begi...

A sky full of the famous monarch butterflies in Michoacan, Mexico. It's hard to capture this special phenomenon -- millions of butt...

It's hard to spot new birds during Massachusetts winters (I don't own a house with a yard or a bird feeder, which makes it doubly h...

A different version of this piece was  published  back in 2009, in the OR/MS Today magazine. __ It is well known that   the partition ...