Prompted by a recent discussion of prime numbers and complex dynamics on one of the Santa Fe Institute’s FaceBook pages, I posted a link to an old project of mine, going back to a time when I was first learning programming in college and working as an orderly in a hospital x-ray department.  Something about the collision of those influences in the medium of my gray matter led me to see curious connections among self-documenting programs, self-indexing data structures, and molecular tagging.  Shortly afterwards a couple of Mathematical Games columns by Martin Gardner started me thinking about Gödel numbers and links among graph theory, logic, and number theory.

At any rate, here’s a report on what came of that —

• Riffs and Rotes