When is iron rare and gold abundant, and Tweeting around the table

Abstract

When is iron rare and gold abundant? If you live in the US and your last name is “Iron,” you share it with fewer than 300 other Americans, according to the US Census. But while your name might be rare, its eponym isn’t. Iron is the fourth most abundant element in Earth’s crust. Strange as it may sound, elemental abundance and American last-name frequency are inversely correlated, according to a study published in the Annals of Improbable Research Online. Eric R. and Ell A. Schulman found 12 elements that appear in the US Census Bureau’s surname database, which means at least 100 Americans claim them. Ell, a college student, was thinking of elements as names. Eric, Ell’s father and a physicist by training with a penchant for irreverent science writing, wanted to see if he could plot the census data against something else. He settled on abundance. TheSchulmans found that