12 Oct
2011
12 Oct
'11
12:51 p.m.
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.