This Year in Review (2019)

Hello readers of CP!

December 16th marked the six month anniversary of the launch of Cantor’s Paradise on Medium. Since then, we’ve published a total of 67 stories from 15 talented writers, covering math-related topics ranging from How to Estimate the Number of Aliens in the Galaxy, The Pigeonhole principle, The Four-Color theorem, The Limits of Logic, to The Basics of Big-O, Uncomputable Numbers, Unexpected Beauty in Primes and much more.

Key Stats for Cantor’s Paradise (2019)

• Stories were opened more than 1 million times
• Stories were read for more than 2,5 million minutes
• More than 4,500 unique readers visited CP daily
• More than 5,000 people followed the publication on Medium
• More than 10,000 people followed the publication on Facebook

The single day with the most traffic was November 18th when 48,471 unique visitors read for 308,632 minutes cumulatively.

Top 5: Most Popular Stories

The following five stories were the most popular in terms of views in 2019:

1. “The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann” (2019)
2. “The Ramanujan Summation: 1 + 2 + 3 + ⋯ + ∞ = -1/12?” (2018)
3. “The Riemann Hypothesis, explained” (2016)
4. “The Black-Scholes formula, explained” (2019)
5. “The Math Behind that Dick Joke in HBO’s Silicon Valley” (2019)

Top 5: Highest Average Reading Time

The following five stories had the highest average reading time in 2019:

1. “The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann” (2019)
2. “The Riemann Hypothesis, explained” (2016)
3. “Richard Feynman on Artificial General Intelligence” (2019)
4. “Understanding the Monty Hall Problem” (2019)
5. “Richard Feynman’s Integral Trick” (2018)

Top 5: Most Minutes Read

The following five stories were read for the most minutes in 2019:

1. “The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann” (2019)
2. “The Ramanujan Summation: 1 + 2 + 3 + ⋯ + ∞ = -1/12?” (2018)
3. “The Riemann Hypothesis, explained” (2016)
4. “Richard Feynman’s Integral Trick” (2018)
5. “The Math Problems from Good Will Hunting” (2019)

Top 5: Most Popular Stories, per Word

The following five stories accumulated the most views, relative to word count in 2019:

1. “The Ramanujan Summation: 1 + 2 + 3 + ⋯ + ∞ = -1/12?” (2018)
2. “How to Perform Calendar Calculations in Your Head” (2019)
3. “The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann” (2019)
4. “Richard Feynman’s Integral Trick” (2018)
5. “The Black-Scholes formula, explained” (2019)

Cantor’s Paradise would never have existed without the continuous encouragement of our readers. Thank you for being a reader of CP, and stay tuned for plenty of new math-related essays in 2020!

Best,

Jørgen Veisdal, Editor

This Year in Review (2019) was originally published in Cantor’s Paradise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.