RIP Philip J. Davis (1923–2018) and Writing Uncountably Many Articles

Philip J. Davis, an applied mathematician and very prolific writer, died on Tuesday.

I have a pet peeve in the above obituary: Don't write sentences like "He wrote countless books, articles, and book reviews imbued with his personal perspective." in the obituary of a mathematician, especially if he is an analyst (with much work in numerical analysis, in this case). Trust me: it's countable (and, actually, it's finite).

For most of us, we'll be more familiar with the many essays and (especially) book reviews that Davis wrote for SIAM News.

(Tip of the cap to the SIAM Twitter account.)

Fractions and Percentages

Alright, this really irks me: When your quantity or label is clearly a fraction, don't bloody call the thing a "percentage". So many people make this mistake. There is a multiplicative factor of 100 that specifically makes these objects different, and this is taught explicitly from an early age. Grrr....

Update: As it turns out, the example that reminded me of this particular one of my pet peeves turned out to correctly be a percentage. Go figure. Anyway, I am obviously fallible. (This is a common mistake, though, and it's annoying.)