This is the 5,000th post on this blog. I started blogging in 2008, and Wayne Joubert started contributing posts last year. We’ve written an average of between five and six posts a week for the last 17 years.
I thought about listing some of the most popular posts over the years, but that’s not as simple as it sounds. Popularity varies over time, and posts are popular with different people for different reasons. I don’t have a way of quantifying what posts have been popular with regular readers, but I’m such a list would be very different from the lists below.
Recent favorites
Here are posts that have been popular over the last year.
I knew that the ASCII post was popular, but before looking at stats I had no idea anyone was reading the other two posts. I imagine regular readers are more interested in things like my recent series on the logistic map.
Hacker News
The first post to go viral was Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity. Hacker News sent the site more traffic than it could handle at the time.
Many of the posts that have seen a lot of traffic have been posted on Hacker News. I very much appreciate everyone who posts my work there. Because Hacker News readers tend to be programmers, my most popular posts have tended to be programming-related. The posts most popular with regular readers are not as tilted toward programming.
Here are a few more posts that have been popular because of Hacker News.
Code snippets
I didn’t realize until Tim Hopper pointed it out that a lot of projects on Github mention this blog, either to cite an article as a reference or to use code I’ve posted. That’s fine, by the way: feel free to use whatever you find useful. Here is Tim’s list of mentions.
Here’s an index of stand-alone code. Everything these code snippets do can be found in standard software libraries. However, these code samples remain popular because sometimes you cannot import a library or do not want to. I mentioned an example of this in the previous post. I’ve had several consulting projects where there was something new about their project that meant they had to develop basic mathematical software from scratch.
Calculators
This site started as a set of hand-written HTML pages, and there are a still a few such pages, especially calculators. Some of these have been surprisingly popular. (“Surprising” and “popular” seem to always go together. I can kinda predict when something will be moderately popular, but the most popular content is always a surprise to me.)
A note to new readers
If you’re new to this site, the links above may give a wrong impression. I mostly write about math and statistics, and occasionally about other topics such as data privacy or music. None of the posts above are typical.
If you’d like to be notified of posts as they come out, you can subscribe via RSS or follow one of my X accounts. I also have a newsletter where I introduce posts two or three at a time.
Thanks for reading.
I’ve been reading for almost a decade (now using an RSS feed no thanks to your posts on the benefits of RSS feeds) and I can say that this blog is what got me into computational mathematics in the first place. I am now in my fourth year of study pursuing a doctorate in such a field. Thank you so much for all of the great posts!