I visited my eighth and final Louis Sullivan jewel box bank yesterday morning. The Purdue State Bank (now a Chase branch) is in West Lafayette, Indiana. As a graduate of the University of Illinois, I have thoughts about Purdue University and its substandard engineering program, but I will keep those thoughts to...

Yesterday I visited the Home Building Association Bank in Newark, Ohio, a Louis Sullivan jewel box bank built in 1914. It’s currently owned by the Licking County Foundation (oh, grow up), which restored it at considerable cost over several years and reopened it to the public last fall. As you can see from the photo...

Last year, around Labor Day, I visited five of Louis Sullivan’s jewel box banks: Farmers and Merchants Union Bank in Columbus, Wisconsin National Farmers’ Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota Henry Adams Building in Algona, Iowa Merchant’s National Bank in Grinnell, Iowa People’s Savings Bank in Cedar Rapids, Iowa These all...

This week’s episode of Upgrade (which I listened to on a longish drive yesterday) has a preview of Jason Snell and Myke Hurley’s upcoming Designed in California podcast. No, not the “Road to the Apple II” series they’ve been squeezing into the Upgrade feed these past few weeks. This sneak preview—with special guest...

I’ve been thinking about 1984 lately—the year, not the novel. What got me thinking about it was the reduction in gas prices over the past few weeks, and this article in the New York Times about Donald Trump’s declining poll numbers among white working-class voters and how that might affect November’s elections.1...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] At the end of yesterday’s post about the combinatorics of the World Cup group stage, I said “this is good enough for me.” Turns out that was a lie. Today I rewrote some of the...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] We’re in the middle of the first set of games in the group stage of the 2026 World Cup, and I’ve been thinking about how many ways the points can be distributed among the teams...

I took a bike ride this morning on a portion of the I&M Canal Trail from Romeoville to Joliet and back. It’s a fairly short ride, eight miles each way, and that distance got me thinking about using Mathematica to do some calculations after I got back home. The trail has mile markers with little snippets of...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] After my last post—the one about using Fourier series—I started thinking about how to use Mathematica to develop Fourier series.1 I could, of course, use the Integrate function...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] We’re finally here, at the end of all things. In this post, we’ll use a Fourier series to get the formula for the center deflection of a simply supported beam with a uniformly...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] This would have been the last post in the series if I hadn’t realized recently that another method deserved a post. So this is the penultimate. It was described in this 1943...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] We’re in the home stretch of this series, so ANIAT will soon go back to complaining about Apple’s UI choices.1 Next week’s WWDC keynote should provide some inspiration. But...