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The Puzzle [mathjax]Here’s an interesting puzzle: The hostess of a baby shower devises a game in which sixteen tokens are placed in an opaque bag. The tokens are all either pink or blue, and they’re otherwise identical in shape, weight, texture, and so on. Two guests are chosen. The first guest chooses a single token…
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Here’s a fun little problem: Find three three-digit numbers that use each non-zero numeral once and add up to 999. Follow-up: How many such sets of numbers exist? If you want, take a moment to work on the problem on your own. Then continue reading. Finding a solution For the first question, any set of…
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An interesting question on the G+ Mathematics community I co-moderate asked about the difference between “numbers” and “numerals”. We wound up discussing this at a party I was hosting (which shows the sort of nerds we are), and this post is born from those discussions and my further thoughts. It seems to me we have…
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[mathjax]This is the formula for the circumference of a circle: \[C = 2\pi r\] It’s very simple. My recollection of how it was taught is as a mystical relationship between \(\pi\) and the circumference, as if it were some magical truth that \(\pi\), of all numbers, would be the number that would satisfy the need…
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Tee hated skim. Crystal knew that with all of ter heart: Tee hated Marcus, body and soul. The way that skee looked at tim, with that glib smirk, that cologne that skee wore in a cloud of sweet seduction, that swagger in sker step as skee stood by the coffee maker. And oh, how tee…
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The wanderer stopped at the side of the road, stooped down, and considered an apple that had settled itself into the muddy sluiceway. It did not appear to have come there naturally. There were apple trees in the distance, to be sure: Ghostly fingers reaching up into the late November sky, backed by a gray…
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That morning, I met with Oleg in the house in the valley at the bottom of the steep road that nobody with any sense would ever try to drive up, the one carved straight up the side of the hill because people in that part of the world had apparently never heard of switchbacks. I…