Whenever I go to the WordPress Stats page for this blog, I see that my most popular post (most popular by far) is “Names of Polygons,” which I posted on December 10, 2010! It had 361 views last month, nearly seven years later. What’s up with that? It’s actually a pretty routine post, with a boring title, though it does have a couple of twists. If you google “names of polygons,” the link doesn’t even make the first page of links. ’Tis a mystery.

My only other consistently popular post is “Math is hard, let’s go shopping, says Barbie (and others),” which is from even longer ago — April 4, 2008. It had 90 views last month, so it was way back in second place. It’s a little easier to hypothesize why that one might be popular, even though it’s nearly ten years old, which is a couple of lifetimes on the Internet.

These stats weren’t especially anomalous last month, in case you were wondering. Sometimes the ranking is swapped, but they’re almost always my top two. For example, during all of 2016 the polygon post garnered 887 views and the Barbie post 1,035. Weird.

Categories: Math, Technology