My two-year contract in Thailand is up. The next two months will be filled with travelling and searching for a new location from September. Ah, I almost forgot, with fishing as well.
This blog will resume September 1. Take care till then!
By the way, if you need advanced daily problems try this site in the meantime. One example:
It is nice to see how the number of free online mathematical journals is increasing. The latest one out is JUM, Journal of Unpublishable Mathematics. Volume 1 can be found for download on this page.
I’ve always been amazed at the power and the effectiveness of the simulation technique, and whenever possible I’ve used simulations in mathematics. Since I’ve always loved sport as well, I decided a few years back to see how I could put them together to produce a maths-based World Cup simulation for teachers and pupils to use. The simulation proved very popular in primary and secondary schools, and this article is a revised version of what I wrote then. – Alan Parr
Here is Parr’s article on how you can simulate the World Cup with your students or friends.
Round 2 ended with four teams with full score and Japan at the top. Two rounds remain before the elimination part. Round 3 will be played in a few days.
- You look bored!
- Yeah. I don’t know what to do. Nothing inspires me.
- You are as sent from heaven!
- Yeah?
- Make a circle and colour every point on its circumference red or blue.
- Won’t that take a long time?
- And? You said you had nothing to do.
- OK. But what’s the point?
- Pun intended?
- What pun?
- The old lady in the bakery asserts that regardless of how you colour the points one can always find an isosceles triangle with equally coloured vertices on the circle.
- I didn’t know you shopped at the bakery.
Problem source: Mathematical problems by Andrew Adler.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. - Daniel Patrick Moynihan
- Give me three distinct primes?
- Will 5, 11, and 19 do?
- That’s fine.
- What is the sum of the sum and the product of these?
- Did you swallow a whale?
- What is 5 + 11 + 19 + 5 * 11 * 19?
- 1080.
- Prove that regardless of which three distinct primes you start with, p + q + r + p * q * r is never a prime.
- Not even once?
Problem source: Berkeley Math Circle.
There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else – but persistent. – Raoul Bott
- Yesterday, I went to this crazy party!
- Why do I never get invited to parties like that?
- No, you wouldn’t have liked this one.
- Why not?
- We all had to answer 100 yes/no questions before we could eat!
- You are kidding?!
- Afterwards we compared our answers.
- What on earth for?
- I had 98 of the same answers as Belinda.
- Belinda was there?! I should have been invited!!!
- Belinda had 98 of the same answer as Carlos.
- What about you and Carlos?
- We did not compare. He said we didn’t have to.
- How come?
- He said he could calculate it from the data we already had.
- Really?! My feeling is that all you can calculate is the range of common answers.
- Could be. But I tell you something stranger.
- Shoot.
- You know Carl?
- Carlos brother? Of course, I know him. We play Go every Tuesday.
- He asked us what we would do if the theoretical minimum number of common answers were bigger than the number of common answers between Carlos and I!
- Is he on medication?
- No, but he reads New York Times a lot.
Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character. – Oscar Levant