Fun
My interests in language, math, and computers were sparked and strengthened by exposure to the works of Willard R. Espy, Louis Phillips, Mike Keith, Dmitri Borgmann, Jim Butterfield, and others. These writers share a great talent for making technical or linguistic topics fun and accessible to a general audience. This page collects some of my own contributions to popular and recreational mathematics and linguistics, plus a few other odds and ends.
Logology
Logology, or recreational linguistics, is the study and practice of word games and wordplay. Since 2012 I've been writing the Language Games column for Babel: The Language Magazine, and I am a regular contributor of language-themed articles and puzzles to Lingo: The Language Magazine for Younger Readers, Games World of Puzzles (formerly Games Magazine), Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics, and other magazines.
- Shakespeare's Sonnet Generator, a website that randomly generates authentic Shakespearean sonnets (a collaboration with Dave Morice)
- A selection of my logological articles from Word Ways (open access from two years after the date of publication):
- Pessimal spelling alphabets
- Russian–English homoglyphs, homographs, and homographic translations
- Dvorak typewriter words
- Perfect Roman windows
- The world's shortest personal names
- Unigraphic lipogrammatic windows: A survey
- Higher-order contronyms
- Elemental words revisited
- Gadsby: Wikipedia's lost lipogram
- Ichthyornithonomy
Recreational mathematics
These papers are mainly for fun, though some of them have some serious research content:
- Why I will never have a girlfriend (published in The Annals of Improbable Research, 2002)
- Warum ich niemals eine Freundin haben werde, a German translation of the above
- Knight-graphable words (with Mike Keith; published in Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics, February 2015)
- A255436: Number of distinct, connected, order-n subgraphs of the infinite knight's graph (published in The On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, February 2015)
- New puzzles on knight-graphable words (with Mike Keith; published in Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics, May 2015)
Light verse
A selection of my humorous poetry:
- "Firing the Fireman" (published in Light, Winter/Spring 2014)
- "Ichthyopoesis" (published in Light, Winter/Spring 2014)
- "Quadrature" (published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, July 2015)
- "Paradox" (published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, July 2015)
- "Apprehension" (published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, July 2015)
- Haiku (published in Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics, February 2014)