SEPTEMBER 21, 2023.* The menu bar on this site just acquired a new entry: Devlin’s Angle. It provides a complete archive of all the posts I published for the Mathematical Association of America’s online information service MAA Online since January 1996, when that site launched. In 2018, MAA Online morphed into a multi-author blog (on a new commercial platform) called Math Values.* By the time that happened, Devlin Angle posts were spread over three databases, the third being the commercial blog platform BlogSpot, which hosted all Devlin’s Angle posts from August 2011 through to the end of 2018.
In the Fall of 2023, in the course of an upgrade to the Math Values website, all the Devlin’s Angle posts from the first post in January 1996 through to July 2011 (when MAA Online moved over to BlogSpot) were lost. Fortunately, I still had the files I submitted to the MAA each month for publication. Since those are, for the most part, HTML files (that’s how we did it back then!), I was able to reproduce those posts on this profkeithdevlin.org site almost exactly as they would have appeared (apart from page-style issues). [The first year, 1996, was an exception, as I explain in the 1996 archive.]
What has been lost are any editorial changes to each post made by the MAA Online editor at the time (usually minor), and any corrections I made after publication. (All my MAA posts are subject to editorial control by the MAA.) Some of those changes may have been somewhat substantive, though hopefully none were corrections to major-league-bad factual errors. Also, as the series developed over time, posts started to have accompanying photographs. On a few occasions, I still had the source images and could include them in these archive posts. But many have been lost.
In addition to recreating the lost posts, I created an annotated index of all posts up to today, which I plan to keep current. I also intend to try to update any broken links in that quarter-century-plus series of posts. I fixed some while I was recreating the archive, but only if I chanced on them when adding the annotations in the index. I suspect there are a great many links still left dangling. We were online pioneers when MAA Online launched, and there were few safety mechanisms in the early years. Things changed rapidly, and with the passage of time, linked sources disappeared or acquired new URLs.
All that aside, I hope (some of) you find the new Devlin’s Angle section of this site of use. — KD
* ADDED FEBRUARY 16, 2025: In early 2025, Math Values changed platform host, in the course of which the URLs of all posts from January 2018 to date changed. In response, I edited this site on February 15, 2025 to give the updated URLs. The Math Values site itself now has the URL https://maa.org/math-values/.]
profkeithdevlin.org 