Like Lorenzo Jones

Lorenzo Jones was a soap opera on radio a long time ago. Each show began, "We all know couples like lovable, impractical Lorenzo Jones and his devoted wife, Belle. Lorenzo's inventions have made him a character to the town, but not to Belle, who loves him. Their struggle for security is anybody's story, but somehow, with Lorenzo, it has more smiles than tears."

My wife, Ann, keeps reminding me of this impractical person. I'm always telling her of inventions that I'm thinking of creating. The fact is I have some credits I can point to but, like Lorenzo Jones' creations, they have not gone very far.

My first was with an item I called The Fractions Book. I worked on this book as a teenager. The book recorded eight decimal places for all proper fractions from 1 to 150. I thought this book would be useful for those who worked with fractions. It took years of effort but I finally completed it. I didn't try to do anything with it, however. Nowadays, the same book can be created with a computer in just a few seconds.

As a young man I created a perpetual calendar that gave the day of the week for every date in history and the indefinite future. This was in chart form and can be seen on the cover of my book, The Lighter Side of Math. I didn't invent the idea of perpetual calendars. This had been done many years ago. I simply invented one that I thought was better than any other. It's a work of art but nobody needs one.

Later I came up with a new method for multiplying two digits by two digits and three digits by three digits. The method is so obvious that I'm surprised I haven't seen the method described on the Internet. This method is in the same book as the one mentioned above.

Some decades ago, I coined the word palinilap as a synonym for palindrome. At least, I thought I had coined the word. Lately, I often see the word on the Internet. I've taken possession of the word by opening a web site named palinilap.com. The word has no use that I can see.

At about the same time, I invented a cipher called the Keyboard Code. A touch-typist places his or her fingers on the wrong home keys and types a message. The ensuing message is unreadable. The recipient of the message places his or her fingers on a different set of wrong home keys and types the encoded message. The output is the original message. This cipher seems so obvious that I should think many others had invented the same thing. I inadvertently discovered this code when I was writing a homework paper for a writing course. When I looked at what I had written, it was gibberish.

There are a few more things I could mention; nothing useful. I'm thinking of changing my first name to Lorenzo.