2011.06.30

2011.06.30

Plans for the Summer

For the last month I have been steadily adding new content. I am currently on my summer break from college so I now have time to pursue on independent projects, including this site. Although I had previously stated that updates would be made quarter-annually, I have now realized that this is somewhat impractical. Because of the demands of college it has become clear that I would never have enough time to make significant progress on my site during the school year. The only time I would have is during my winter, and summer breaks. To compensate for the fact that I can only work on my website a part of the year I've decided not to do a single update, but rather get as much done on my website during the vacation. Mind you, I do have other interests and projects, and even other responsibilities, so I can't devote my whole summer to this site. None the less I have been making strides. I am definitely looking forward to the new content I'm planning on publishing. It will be some of the most interesting stuff on this site to date.

Specifically I'm planning to try and finish chapter 2-4, the chapter on the "illion series". This in itself is proving a massive project because several individuals have invented naming schemes over the last hundred years. I probably can not hope to catalog a complete list of systems, but I can certainly catalog the more well known and popular ones. I plan to have articles on the systems by Prof. Henkle, Mr. Ondrajka, Conway&Guy, Russ Rowlett, Donald Knuth, Jonathan Bowers, Harry Foundalis, and Louis Epstein. If I go along with what I'm planning chapter 2-4 will be the most content loaded chapter to date. I'm also planning to work on chapter 3-1 and introduce most of the well known large number functions including: Knuth Up arrows, Steinhaus-Moser Polygons, Grahams function, chain arrows, and many more. I also feel that chapter 1-1 is in need of repair. Being the introductory chapter its contents are important for what follows. I was never completely satisfied with how that chapter turned out. Some things I would like to add is an article on bases, the babylonian counting system, and revised material on tally systems, roman numerals, and egyptian numbers. Lastly I'm trying to improve the flow of the site to make it more user friendly. A chapter select has been added to "chapter pages" so that users can now jump to any chapter from any chapter, rather than having to return to the home page. The long series of introductory text on the homepage has now been relocated so users instantly get to see the chapter select. I am considering adding some kind of index at some point because eventually people are going to want to be able to find specific information quickly once the site starts to get even larger.

There is no telling how much material I'll be able to get done during the summer, but it is definitely my hope to at least get most of 2-4 and 3-1 done before the end of the summer. School starts towards the end of August. That means I still have about two months left. Most likely I'll resume where ever I leave off on my next winter break. In any case, expect good things for 2011. The site is finally starting to move past early development to become an actual resource, and a better addition to the wealth of information already out there. Stay tuned for 2011!

Sincerely,

-- Sbiis Saibian