1. Rich writes: << One of my favorite word puzzles is finding "consecutive" words, where the last letter is incremented to make a new word. CONVEX CONVEY ...
Just wondering in what sense you mean "consecutive" (since e.g. CONVEXITY would appear between these words alphabetically). ------------------------------------------------------------- 2. The NY Times had a nice short article by Dennis Overbye in Sunday's Week in Review section (June 29) that is a paean to the joys of math. (It's nice to have at least one math fan writing for the public.) This is freely available through next Saturday on the web; sorry I can't dig up the URL right now (but just go to www.nytimes.com and it should be easy to find, esp. with advanced search). Overbye mentions that string theory has made the subject of Riemann surfaces a hot topic. Can anyone please explain this remark to me? (Please bear in mind that I have only a vague metaphoric idea of what string theory is about.) (First guess: String theory as I understand it posits little simple closed curves in physics space (11 dimensional?) a what underlie elementary particles. Maybe now someone has suggested replacing the s.c.c.'s with surfaces?) --Dan