News: One Hundred Factorial
An opening gambit for the Numbers game
It was O'Week a couple of weeks ago, when new students arrive on campus to find out how uni works and the services they have access to. Our tradition for the last several years is to play Numbers and Letters on a big whiteboard out in public as a way to engage with students. This year I discovered a way to help people engage: write something on the board that is not a solution.
Panda Squares
This post is about a puzzle I've been tweeting about for the last couple of days. I got it originally from a book I was given back in the 1980's called "Ivan Moscovich's Super Games". In the book, Ivan calls this puzzle "Bits", but I don't think that's nearly descriptive or cute enough, so I asked my daughter what it should be called and we have come up with the much better name of PANDA SQUARES.
David Butler and the Prisoner of Alhazen
Once upon a time, I did a PhD in projective geometry. It was all about objects called quadrals (a word I made up) - ovals, ovoids, conics, quadrics and their cones - and the lines associated with them - tangents, secants, external lines, generator lines. During the first two years, I did talks about my PhD research, which I could not resist calling "David Butler and the Philosopher's Cone" and "David Butler and the Chamber of Secants".
Four alternatives to the four fours
The "Four Fours" is a very well-known little problem that encourages some creative thinking and use of the order of operations. The purpose of this post is to show you four fourfoursesque puzzles I've created which have encouraged some great learning.
Spotless dice
Upon Amie聽Albrecht and Cathy Wilton's request, I am writing a blog post about a problem we worked on at One Hundred Factorial recently. A聽few weeks ago we became interested in problems involving removing spots from dice.
Quarter the Cross
At the end of last year, the MTBoS (Math(s) Twitter Blog-o-Sphere) introduced me to this very interesting task: you have a cross made of four equal squares, and you are supposed to colour in exactly 1/4 of the cross and justify why you know it's a quarter. I call it "Quarter the Cross".
Individual Ahas
At the Hmm... Sessions in November, something cool happened when a couple of the students were showing the rest of us the solution to a puzzle.
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