Actually, that "Alphabetic Number Table" was done by Radia Perlman (I think when she was a freshman), possibly from a suggestion by Rota. The vaguely amusing side story is that it had to be printed twice, because she spelled "forty" wrong the first time. --ms On 10/12/2011 2:51 PM, Dan Asimov wrote:
Circa 1980 someone at MIT showed me a little pamphlet floating around, created by Gian-Carlo Rota, of all the integers between I think 1 and 1000, listed purely in English, alphabetically. The idea that this could have any conceivable use struck me as so absurd that I could not stop laughing for quite a while.
--Dan
Hans wrote:
<< Don Knuth& Allan Miller: A Programming and Problem-Solving Seminar, . . . . . Chapter 1 of the seminar (Alphabetized Integers) provides a good background discussion, contextualizing the problem. Sometimes the brain has a mind of its own.
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