In Mathematics Magic and Mystery by Martin Gardner, the author presents an interesting card trick to create a magic square (where all rows and columns add to the same number), using an interesting interactive game with a participant. After playing a game of tic-tac-toe, your friends will be surprised to see they set up the cards in a 3×3 grid summing the number on the cards to 15!
Continue reading “The Tic-Tac-Toe Magic Square trick”Matt Parker’s Christmas Tree Net
If you haven’t seen Matt Parker’s Christmas Tree folding puzzle or received in on email/mail yet, you can read about it in one of his recent videos: I can confirm that it does fold in to a few different shapes!
Continue reading “Matt Parker’s Christmas Tree Net”Wordle game analysis with Python
Wordle is an interesting word game in the style of the old mastermind game. You can try it out on NYT puzzle page or other places. Check it out and try a round!
Continue reading “Wordle game analysis with Python”Knime conference coming up
Next week the KNIME fall conference will be happening, Nov 14-16. For mathematicians or anyone wanting to look at some useful AI/Machine learning tools, this should be an informative conference! I’ve seen some previous sessions with interesting demos and overviews of new features they add to this open-source tool. Virtual passes are free to the live-streamed event! If it is like past online lessons, it is likely they will also be available later from their Youtube channel page.
Puzzles – an open-source collection
Many mathematicians enjoy puzzles – and digging in to interesting code. Simon’s Puzzle collection is an open source collection of puzzles that any mathematician would enjoy:
Continue reading “Puzzles – an open-source collection”Testing solutions to the 100-prisoners puzzle.
Both Matt Parker and the Youtube Veritasium channel have reviewed the surprising best practice for the 100 prisoners puzzle. The puzzle is a way to find a solution that will let the prisoners win with the most probability. If you have not seen this already please see the video here before some spoilers below.
Continue reading “Testing solutions to the 100-prisoners puzzle.”Optimal placements and unsolved math problems
Optimal placements and unsolved math problems are among the interesting problems discussed in the book, Tomorrow’s Math, Second Edition by C. Stanley Ogilvy. On chapter two, pg.23-24 he asks how a land’s defenses may be best defended by n defense stations on a disk shaped land area? They state it had known answers for n<6, and “a general solution seems remote at present”.
Continue reading “Optimal placements and unsolved math problems”Humboldt Math Festival – next Weekend!
If you live in USA, West Coast, this is something you won’t want to miss – after previous cancellations in 2020, this is up and running again, and will be Apr 2, 2022 this year. Check out the website for details: https://humboldtmathfestival.weebly.com/
Happy Pi Day 2022
Once again it is Pi day, a great time to make pie – or order a Pizza or Pie (check if your local restaurants have a special Pi day deal 🙂 )
This year Pi day comes on a Monday, which hasn’t happened since 2016! There are some interesting tricks to calculating what any given day of the week was, and I’ll leave you with a video that James Grime published with some math tricks for the day of the week for any given date:
Continue reading “Happy Pi Day 2022”Happy Twosday! and a Surprising Pi trick
In Ben Sparks’ video he shows a very interesting trick. On a decimal angle calculator run:
sin(1/5555)
If your calculator has more than the standard Ubuntu calculator’s digits of accuracy you could add even more repeating 5’s. The answer is approximately PI with extra zeros…
0.000003142
Since today is Twosday (2-22-2022 in any date format), here is a similar Tuesday math trick for the Python console:
from math import sin
sin(22/700000.0)
It is also .0003142… or approximately Pi!
Continue reading “Happy Twosday! and a Surprising Pi trick”