Month: August 2016

Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist in the 19th and 20th centuries. Pareto has several contributions to the field of microeconomics, but his most famous one was based on an observation of wealth distribution in 1890s Italy. Specifically, the distribution of wealth followed a power law, where the output of a function follows a trend…

Barbra Streisand is an actress, entertainer, and the best selling female recording artist in history, having 33 albums make the Billboard top 10 and selling close to 150 million records worldwide. She is a multiple time Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, and Golden Globe recipient. In 2003 Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman to remove a picture of…

John Morton was the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England at the end of the fifteenth century. Part of his role at such a high level was setting tax policy for the kingdom, with the goal of restoring the assets of Henry VII’s royal house after the war-heavy reigns of Edward IV and…

There’s [ed note: up until it closed in 2024] a lovely rum & punch bar in Haight-Ashbury with the name Hobson’s Choice, but the slogan on their sign (“Order what you like, as long as it’s what I offer”) doesn’t quite go far enough. Hobson’s Choice is, “Take it or leave it.” Specifically, it is…

Like Occam’s Razor, Hanlon’s Razor is a guiding principle for how to shave away that which is unnecessary or unhelpful. In this case, rather than hypotheses or theories, Hanlon’s Razor’s focus is people’s motives. As commonly stated, “Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.” While it’s true that, economically speaking, decision making…

William of Ockham was a 14th-century philosopher and theologian, educated at Oxford and having completed the requirements for a master’s degree but not granted such a degree. Technically a student but admitted into the ranks of the faculty at Oxford, Ockham’s commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences (a standard reference of Christian theology at the time)…

Today is August 15th, and so for today’s Eponymy in August, the number 150, the consensus estimated value for Dunbar’s Number, is the star of the show. Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, who has taught at Bristol, Cambridge, University College London, Liverpool, and Oxford. His specialty is primate psychology and social behaviors,…

Today we end Nerd Week for Eponymy in August with the Markov Chain.Andrey Markov was a professor of mathematics at St Petersburg University from 1880 until 1910, when he was removed from his professorship after he would not comply with an order to monitor his students (stemming from the student riots in 1908). In 1917…

Tom Duff is a programmer for Pixar. Previously he worked for, among other places, Lucasfilm and Bell Labs. Duff is the creator of the rc shell for the Plan 9 operating system as well as the co-creator of Marionette, the animation system used by Pixar. Duff’s Device is a clever exploit of a WTF in…

Today’s Eponymy in August (Nerd Week) is Currying. This doesn’t have anything to do with Indian food; it does have to do with the intersection of math and programming. A bit of background: functions are mathematical constructs. They don’t just exist in programming computers. In math, a function is relation between a domain (a set…