Whew. How are you all doing? It's been a while, I realize.
I'm making some changes to my blogging. I will now maintain not just one, but three blogs. This one will be solely for more advanced and interesting mathematical content. In particular, I plan to continue expanding the AHSMP, but I will also continue to post other mathematical content of interest. My math posts get by far the most hits, and I didn't want to continue muddying the mathematical waters with personal content. New blogging about teaching and my personal life will now appear on my first new blog, Math Spectrometer (so named because I'm identifying the elements of my math life—quite the geeky pun, I know; my father the physicist will be proud). Previous posts will not be deleted from this one, though. Also appearing on the new blog are my "greatest hits"; namely political, personal, and teaching-related posts that have either gotten a lot of traffic or are my personal favorites. Finally, my third blog (which I haven't started yet...UPDATE: it's here, but under construction!) will contain a) explanations of more basic high school math concepts (most that I find online are frankly not that good) and b) links to the book chapters I will someday write that will be available for sale via print-on-demand publishing. My experience with math textbooks so far has been somewhat disappointing; I may be kidding myself, but I think I can do better. The reviews of my math writing on this site have been pretty good, so we'll see how that goes.
On a different note, this week marks the 2 year anniversary of the post that put me on the blogging map. It's the one about how .999... equals 1. When it was picked up on the front page of Digg, I was getting many hits (over 25,000 on one day). During that time, I was on a road trip with my wife, and we met some of her friends whom I told about the post—my jaw dropped when one of them said, "Wait, that was you?"
The post inspired over 1000 comments, many doing their best to discredit the mathematical fact, and many more trying to convince those disbelievers that I was right (a shout out to Monimonika who has kept up with almost all the naysayers: thanks, and you're off the hook now: see below). It inspired several other explanatory posts and a rant or two from me (you can link to them from the main post). I have seen many, many discussion boards on which the topic appeared, and on which the inevitable arguments broke out, many of which made attempts to settle them by linking to my post.
Perhaps most tellingly, as of today, Googling the phrase ".9 repeating equals 1" (among other phrases) lists my page as the number one hit—above Wikipedia's entry on the topic!
Occasionally, there have been people who were convinced by the arguments after initially disbelieving the facts. More often, comments by disbelievers on discussion boards amounted to "that guy is an idiot". They will, I'm sure, continue to argue there. But I've made the decision that the discussion on my site is over. I'm closing all posts in that thread to comments, and comments about it on any other thread will be deleted.
So...I hope to see you all here for more math and at one or both of my new blogs (links on the sidebar at some point soon).
Glad to hear you'll be doing more blogging. I ran into this blog a while back and very much enjoyed what I read, so I'm pleased to hear you'll have more to say!
Posted by: Susan B. | June 25, 2008 at 08:40 PM
Excellent. Good to hear from you again.
Posted by: Joshua Fisher | June 26, 2008 at 09:42 PM