Nathan McNew

Nathan McNew, Jai Setty
On the densities of covering numbers and abundant numbers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23041

The Mid-Atlantic Seminar On Numbers is happening later this month! More info here: tigerweb.towson.edu/nmcnew/mason7/

Try 5calls.org? They have scripts prepared for a variety of timely issues and will give you phone numbers directly for your representatives after you set your location.

The formula for the roots of a cubic polynomial ax^3 + bx^2 + cx + d = 0.

High-school-aged me would be very disappointed to learn that math-professor-aged me, despite 15 years of working as a professional mathematician, has never once meaningfully used the cubic formula to solve a math problem.

Story Circles, developed by grassroots theater in the '60s, evolved in the restorative justice community as a tool to build community. In the #JMM2025 TPSE session tomorrow I'll describe how Towson University's math department has used them to foster connections and dialogue among our math majors.

Number Theorists: The seventh iteration of MASON, the Mid-Atlantic Seminar on Numbers will take place March 29-30 at the Brin Research Center at UMD. tigerweb.towson.edu/nmcnew/mason7/ 🧮

A surprising symmetry: The score of the losing team in every NFL game played since 1920 lies in the closed interval [0,51] (the Chiefs lost 54-51 in 2018). Only two numbers in that range have never been the score of a losing team: 50 (one less than the max) and 1 (one greater than the min).

Welcome! Excited to have you join us!

Yeah walking to the 7800 building today wasn't so fun... but at least it wasn't that cold!

I don’t know what to think about today’s news, but I know that smart kids need better role models than Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

I feel like φ the golden ratio has a pretty good case as the actual "loneliest number" since its rational approximations converge so slowly!

Whitney's 1972 paper shows that if you use a different way of measuring density (called logarithmic density) that then the primes obey Benford's law in that sense.

Intermediate prime factors in specified subsets - Monatshefte für Mathematik Let $$\mathcal {P}$$ P be a fixed set of primes possessing a limiting frequency $$\nu $$ ν , as detected by the weight 1/p. We show that for any fixed $$\alpha \in (0,1)$$ α ∈ ( 0 , 1 ) , the $$\lceil...

Almost! The sequence of prime numbers fails to be Benford for the same reason that the sequence of all integers does - there's just too many of them! Lots of interesting subsequences of primes follow Benford's law though, as do prime-valued statistics about integers like doi.org/10.1007/s006...

Initial Digits for the Sequence of Primes on JSTOR R. E. Whitney, Initial Digits for the Sequence of Primes, The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Feb., 1972), pp. 150-152

A subset of numbers that start with an initial string of digits S is those numbers whose first "digit" is S in a sufficiently high base. (e.g. if you want numbers that start with 73, you can take numbers whose first digit is 73 in base 100.) The idea of jstor.org/stable/2316536 works in any base.

Thomas Kurtz, mathematician, 1928-2024 His invention of the Basic programming language paved the way for the personal computer revolution

“All of us who have written code in the past 60 years can thank Thomas Kurtz. In the 1960s, when computers were massive, expensive and only available to scientists, he believed everyone should have access.” Bill Gates remembers professor Thomas Kurtz, via @financialtimes.com. ⤵️

Hi! I'd love to join too!

A fun REU outcome: After proving a nice theorem generalizing a result from integers to polynomials, on the verge of submitting to a journal, we found a stronger bound came out a year prior. Nevertheless, we extended that result to get a fun theorem that's nearly optimal as the power k-> infinity!

Make the cranberry sauce! And peel the pearl onions of course.