waving android

I am currently a software engineer at Google, where as a member of the Android platform team I build frameworks and user interfaces.

The blog here at is mostly historical; you can find more recent posts on .

Explonential!

October 12th, 2004


I’d like to propose a new word: explonential. Example: “RSS
has gone from a slumbering data specification to a global Web
phenomenon as a result of explonential adoption by publishers
and users alike.” It’s the first in a family of connotative
mathematical functions
I’d like to see used in technical writing.
Like a complex number, a connotative function has two orthogonal axes:
a mathematical basis, and a connotative basis. The formal definition
for an explonential relationship is the following:

(1)

ƒ(n) = an × kaboom!

Here’s another one: fractorial, in which some entity is
actually the product of lots of little versions of itself. Fractorial
systems actually grow in complexity much more rapidly than explonential
ones; proof is left as an exercise.

(2)

ƒ(n) = n × tiny version of n
× tiny version of (tiny version of n)
× …

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