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22 August 2022 – Present situation

Sorry, my schedule is now completely full, so I'm very unlikely to be able to accept new students. However, with the upcoming senior exams, if there's enough demand I may be willing to run some short term weekend sessions.

Ian.

28 July 2022 – Five “and”s in a row

It's an old question: How can you have five "and"s in a row in a sentence that makes sense (semantically and syntactically)?

Solution (highlight to read): Consider a simple phrase like catanddog. There are spaces missing between "cat" and "and", and "and" and "dog".

I covered it with a student yesterday, and we started looking at the sequence of numbers that can be formed by recursively performing the same action (or making the same mistake) required to make the sentence. The numbers increase quite rapidly: 1, 5, 21, 85, ...

I figured out how consecutive terms are related to each other [T_n = 4T_n-1 + 1] – in the process confirming I had 85 correct – then looked it up in The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. It's sequence A002450. I note the number of "and"s in sentences is not listed as one of the applications of the sequence.

22-02-2022 – Present situation

Sorry, my schedule is now reasonably full, so I'm somewhat unlikely to be able to accept new students. However, I do have a waiting list which every so often I manage to whittle back a bit, so enquiries are still welcome.

Ian.

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22 August 2022 – Present situation

28 July 2022 – Five “and”s in a row

22-02-2022 – Present situation

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