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A game of Wordle solved in 3 guesses (a birdie).
Hula hoops were all the rage in 1958. Yo-yos, popular before World War II, were relaunched in the 1960s. Rubik’s Cube, invented in 1974, quickly became a global craze. Sudoku, which had been around for years, was wildly popular when it started to appear in American and European newspapers in 2004.
John H Conway in 2009
[image Denise Applewhite, Princeton University].
John Horton Conway was a charismatic character, something of a performer, always entertaining his fellow-mathematicians with clever magic tricks, memory feats and brilliant mathematics. A Liverpudlian, interested from early childhood in mathematics, he studied at Gonville & Caius College in Cambridge, earning a BA in 1959. He obtained his PhD five years later, after which he was appointed Lecturer in Pure Mathematics.
In 1986, Conway moved to Princeton University, where he was Professor of Mathematics and John Von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He was awarded numerous honours during his career. Conway enjoyed emeritus status from 2013 until his death just two weeks ago on 11 April.
The Sacks Spiral.
The prime numbers have presented mathematicians with some of their most challenging problems. They continue to play a central role in number theory, and many key questions remain unsolved.
Order and Chaos
The primes have many intriguing properties. In his article “The first 50 million prime numbers”, Don Zagier noted two contradictory characteristics of the distribution of prime numbers. The first is the erratic and seemingly chaotic way in which the primes “grow like weeds among the natural numbers”. The second is that, when they are viewed in the large, they exhibit “stunning regularity”.
Children have an almost limitless capacity to absorb knowledge if it is presented in an appealing and entertaining manner. Mathematics can be daunting, but it is possible to convey key ideas visually so that they are instantly accessible. Visiting Explorium recently, I saw such a visual display demonstrating the theorem of Pythagoras, which, according to Jacob Bronowski, “remains the most important single theorem in the whole of mathematics” [TM167 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
A walk on the beach, in the hills or along a river bank provides great opportunities for mathematical reflection. How high is the mountain? How many grains of sand are on the beach? How much water is flowing in the river? [TM156 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
While the exact answers may be elusive, we can make reasonable guesstimates using basic knowledge and simple mathematical reasoning. And we will be walking in the footsteps of some of the world’s greatest thinkers.
Continue reading ‘Rambling and Reckoning’A Colloquium on Recreational Mathematics took place in Lisbon this week. The meeting, RMC-VI (G4GEurope), a great success, was organised by the Ludus Association, with support from several other agencies: MUHNAC, ULisboa, CMAF-IO, CIUHCT, CEMAPRE, and FCT. It was the third meeting integrated in the Gathering for Gardner movement, which celebrates the great populariser of maths, Martin Gardner. For more information about the meeting, see http://ludicum.org/ev/rm/19 .
Do amateurs ever solve outstanding mathematical problems? Professional mathematicians are aware that almost every new idea they have about a mathematical problem has already occurred to others. Any really new idea must have some feature that explains why no one has thought of it before [TM155 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Pierre de Fermat and Srinivasa Ramanujan, two brilliant “amateur” mathematicians.
Continue reading ‘Discoveries by Amateurs and Distractions by Cranks’
Tom Lehrer, mathematician, singer, songwriter and satirist, was born in New York ninety years ago. He was active in public performance for about 25 years from 1945 to 1970. He is most renowned for his hilarious satirical songs, many of which he recorded and which are available today on YouTube [see TM147, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Continue reading ‘Tom Lehrer: Comical Musical Mathematical Genius’
The Indian mathematician D. R. Kaprekar spent many happy hours during his youth solving mathematical puzzles. He graduated from Fergusson College in Pune in 1929 and became a mathematical teacher at a school in Devlali, north-east of Mumbai.
Kaprekar process for three digit numbers converging to 495 [Wikimedia Commons].
Maths is hard: many people find it inscrutable and have negative attitudes towards maths. They may have bad memories of school maths or have been told they lack mathematical talents. This is unfortunate: we all have the capacity to apply reasoning and logic and we can all do maths. Given the vital role mathematics plays in modern society, there is an urgent need to help young people to become more numerate and comfortable with mathematics. With a wealth of online resources, learning maths has never been easier. [TM125 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Eoin Gill and Sheila Donegan with Jadine Rock of Rutland National School, Dublin , at the launch of Maths Week Ireland. Image: Shane O’Neill, SON Photographic.
Numbers can be expressed in several different ways. We are familiar with whole numbers, fractions and decimals. But there is a wide range of other forms, and we examine one of them in this article. Every rational number 
where all 
Suppose we have to ascent a flight of stairs and can take only one or two steps at a time. How many different patterns of ascent are there? We start with the simplest cases. With one step there is only one way; with two, there are two: take two single steps or one double step. With three steps, there are three possibilities. We can now proceed in an inductive manner.
Alice and Bob, are enjoying a drink together. Sitting in a bar-room, they take turns placing beer mats on the table. The only rules of the game are that the mats must not overlap or overhang the edge of the table. The winner is the player who puts down the final mat. Is there a winning strategy for Alice or for Bob?
Image from Flickr.
We start with the simple case of a circular table and circular mats. In this case, there is a winning strategy for the first player. Before reading on, can you see what it is?
* * *
Torricelli’s Trumpet
Evangelista Torricelli, a student of Galileo, is remembered as the inventor of the barometer. He was also a talented mathematician and he discovered the remarkable properties of a simple geometric surface, now often called Torricelli’s Trumpet. It is the surface generated when the curve 
Continue reading ‘Torricelli’s Trumpet & the Painter’s Paradox’
A numerical coincidence is an equality or near-equality between different mathematical quantities which has no known theoretical explanation. Sometimes such equalities remain mysterious and intriguing, and sometimes theory advances to the point where they can be explained and are no longer regarded as surprising.
Cosine of 355 radians is almost exactly equal to -1. Is this a coincidence? Read on!
Imagine a room – the Oval Office for example – that has three electrical appliances:
• An air-conditioner ( a ) with an American plug socket ( A ),
• A boiler ( b ) with a British plug socket ( B ),
• A coffee-maker ( c ) with a Continental plug socket ( C ).
The problem is to connect each appliance to the correct socket, avoiding any crossings of the connecting wires.
Fig. 1: Positions of appliances and sockets for Problem 1.
The golden mean occurs repeatedly in the pentagram [image Wikimedia Commons]
and is the positive root of the quadratic equation
with the value
There is no doubt that
A book of mathematical articles, That’s Maths, has just been published. The collection of 100 articles includes pieces that have appeared in The Irish Times over the past few years, blog posts from this website and a number of articles that have not appeared before.
The book has been published by Gill Books and copies are available through all good booksellers in Ireland, and from major online booksellers. An E-Book is also available online.
We all love music, beautiful paintings and great literature without being trained musicians, talented artists or accomplished writers. It is the same with mathematics: we can enjoy the elegance of brilliant logical arguments and appreciate the beauty of mathematical structures and symmetries without being skilled creators of new theorems. [See TM097, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Harding Gallery. Image from Science Museum, London (www.sciencemuseum.org.uk).
Many problems in mathematics that appear difficult to solve turn out to be remarkably simple when looked at from a new perspective. George Pólya, a Hungarian-born mathematician, wrote a popular book, How to Solve It, in which he discussed the benefits of attacking problems from a variety of angles [see TM094, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
The quadrature of the circle is one of the great problems posed by the ancient Greeks. This “squaring of the circle” was also an issue of particular interest to Leopold Bloom, the central character in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, whom we celebrate today, Bloomsday, 16 June 2016 [see TM093, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Joyce’s Tower, Sandycove, Co Dublin.
The challenge is to construct a square with area equal to that of a given circle using only the methods of classical geometry. Thus, only a ruler and compass may be used in the construction and the process must terminate in a finite number of steps.
Mathematics is everywhere. We are often unaware of it but, when we observe our environment consciously, we can see mathematical structures all around us.
This footbridge is a cornucopia of mathematical forms.
Continue reading ‘Mathematics Everywhere (in Blackrock Station)’
This is a continuation of last week’s post: LINK
The complex power tower is defined by an `infinite tower’ of exponents:
The sequence of successive approximations to this function is
If the sequence 
In Part I we described an attempt to fit a logarithmic spiral to the sequence 
The function defined by an `infinite tower’ of exponents,
is called the Power Tower function. We consider the sequence of successive approximations to this function:
As 
We all know the festive carol The Twelve Days of Christmas. Each day, “my true love” receives an increasing number of gifts. On the first day there is one gift, a partridge in a pear tree. On the second, two turtle doves and another partridge, making three. There are six gifts on the third day, ten on the fourth, fifteen on the fifth, and so on.
Here is a Christmas puzzle: what is the total number of gifts over the twelve days? [TM083, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com]
Suppose six friends visit a pizzeria and have enough cash for just one big pizza. They need to divide it fairly into six equal pieces. That is simple: cut the pizza in the usual way into six equal sectors.
But suppose there is meat in the centre of the pizza and some of the friends are vegetarians. How can we cut the pizza into slices of identical shape and size, some of them not including the central region?
![A pizza with various toppings. Image: Pizza Masetti Craiova, Romania (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.](https://thatsmaths.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/pizza-with-various-toppings.jpg)
A pizza with various toppings. Image: Pizza Masetti Craiova, Romania (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
Suppose a circle is divided by two radii and the two arcs a and b are in the golden ratio:
b / a = ( a + b ) / b = φ ≈ 1.618
Then the smaller angle formed by the radii is called the golden angle. It is equal to about 137.5° or 2.4 radians. We will denote the golden angle by γ. Its exact value, as a fraction of a complete circle, is ( 3 – √5 ) / 2 ≈ 0.382 cycles.
The maths teacher was at his wits’ end. To get some respite, he set the class a task:
Add up the first one hundred numbers.
“That should keep them busy for a while”, he thought. Almost at once, a boy raised his hand and called out the answer. The boy was Carl Friedrich Gauss, later dubbed the Prince of Mathematicians. Continue reading ‘Triangular Numbers: EYPHKA’
The powerful and versatile computational software program called Mathematica is widely used in science, engineering and mathematics. There is a related system called Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine, that can do Mathematica calculations and that runs on an iPad.
Yogi Bear Curve. The Mathematica command to generate this is given below.
Have you ever tried to build a high stack of coins? In theory it’s fine: as long as the centre of mass of the coins above each level remains over the next coin, the stack should stand. But as the height grows, it becomes increasingly trickier to avoid collapse.
Ten chocolate gold grain biscuits, with a hangover of about one diameter.
In theory it is possible to achieve an arbitrarily large hangover — most students find this out for themselves! In practice, at more than about one coin diameter it starts to become difficult to maintain balance.
Continue reading ‘Biscuits, Books, Coins and Cards: Massive Hangovers’
Maths frequently shows us surprising and illuminating connections between physical systems that are not obviously related: the analysis of one system often turns out to be ideally suited for describing another. To illustrate this, we will show how a surface in three dimensional space — the hyperbolic paraboloid, or hypar — pops up in unexpected ways and in many different contexts.
![Warszawa Ochota railway station, a hypar structure [Image Wikimedia Commons].](https://thatsmaths.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/hypar-roof-mid-res.jpg)
Warszawa Ochota railway station, a hypar structure
[Image Wikimedia Commons].
An amusing puzzle appears in a recent book by John A. Adam (2013). The answer is very surprising. The book argues in terms of simultaneous equations. A simpler argument, using the diagram below, should make all clear. Continue reading ‘The Watermelon Puzzle’
A team of German scientists have recently discovered a new method of measuring the speed of light using Einstein’s famous equation
E = m c2
For any randomly chosen decimal number, we might expect that all the digits, 0, 1 , … , 9, occur with equal frequency. Likewise, digit pairs such as 21 or 59 or 83 should all be equally likely to crop up. Similarly for triplets of digits. Indeed, the probability of finding any finite string of digits should depend only on its length. And, sooner or later, we should find any string. That’s “normal”!
Continue reading ‘Amazing Normal Numbers’
With Bloomsday looming, it is time to re-Joyce. We reflect on some properties of a large number occurring in Ulysses.
Continue reading ‘Joyce’s Number’
Long ago in the Gupta Empire, a great-but-greedy mathematician, Grababundel, presented to the Maharaja a new game that he had devised, called Chaturanga.
Thirty-two of the Maharaja’s subjects, sixteen dressed in white and sixteen in black, were assembled on a field divided into 64 squares. There were rajas and ranis, mahouts and magi, fortiers and foot-soldiers. Continue reading ‘Chess Harmony’
Look at the function defined by an `infinite tower’ of exponents:
It would seem that for x>1 this must blow up. But, amazingly, this is not so.
In fact, the function has finite values for positive x up to 
![\displaystyle x = a_0 + \cfrac{1}{ a_1 + \cfrac{1}{ a_2 + \cfrac{1}{ a_3 + \dotsb + \cfrac{1}{a_n} } }} = [ a_0 ; a_1 , a_2 , a_3 , \dots , a_n ]](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cdisplaystyle+x+%3D+a_0+%2B+%5Ccfrac%7B1%7D%7B+a_1+%2B+%5Ccfrac%7B1%7D%7B+a_2+%2B+%5Ccfrac%7B1%7D%7B+a_3+%2B+%5Cdotsb+%2B+%5Ccfrac%7B1%7D%7Ba_n%7D+%7D+%7D%7D+%3D+%5B+a_0+%3B+a_1+%2C+a_2+%2C+a_3+%2C+%5Cdots+%2C+a_n+%5D+&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&s=0&c=20201002)
ThatsMaths 