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Carnival of Mathematics #237 | Flying Colours Maths
Welcome to Carnival of Mathematics #237! It’s traditional to start the post with a few interesting facts about the number… only 237 is one of the dullest numbers in existence. It’s not prime. It has no entry in David Wells’s Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers. It’s not even the sum of two squares, and I honestly think nobody would miss it if it were removed from the natural numbers.
Ice, Ice, Maybe | Flying Colours Maths
It seems the mid-1990s was a wild time for sports scoring. Whoo, boy, that whole Barbados-Grenada thing, for a start. But I wanted to take a moment to look at another, semi-legendary sports story: the 1995 World Figure Skating Championships in “Solihull (branded as Birmingham)”. I’ll let you judge whether that’s an improvement.
A Scroggsvent treat | Flying Colours Maths
Every year, legend Matt Scroggs runs an advent calendar of puzzles, with a prize for some lucky winners. I have enough Chalkdust T-shirts to suggest that I must have won at least once. There is always at least one nice, chewy problem; this year, it was on day 3:
A Puzzle from The Strand (1914) | Flying Colours Maths
The internet has it that this puzzle was presented to Ramanujan, who solved it almost immediately, because of course he did. He was Ramanujan. It’s supposed to be (and may be) a Dudeney puzzle, but it’s not obviously in the one book of those I have. Here’s the puzzle:
Colin’s Cow | Flying Colours Maths
The cow, I should stress, doesn’t belong to me – or even to Colin Wright, who told me about it. In honestly, I struggle to see any cows in it. All the same, I enjoyed the puzzle, and wanted to document it a bit without giving the answer away. However, there is always a risk that talking about how I solved it might give away the solution, so I’ll mark the point at which the discussion starts with a horizontal line as usual.
Don’t Make Me Tap The Sign: $0^0$ is undefined | Flying Colours Maths
There is a tear in the fabric of maths. I’m not talking about Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, however excellent a tear that is; I’m talking about something much more fundamental, some arithmetic that looks like it ought to be basic, but which completely breaks down when you look at it.
Ask Uncle Colin: Splitting Two Pizzas | Flying Colours Maths
Dear Uncle Colin, There are three of us, but only two pizzas - one with a diameter of 30cm and the other with a diameter of 24cm, each split into eight. How can we make sure each of us gets the same area of pizza ((Yes, we have two-dimensional pizzas. What of it?))? - Pizza Is Not Exactly A Priesthood, People - Let’s Eat!
Reasonable rounding | Flying Colours Maths
The first time I ever corrected a teacher ((You would be right to conclude that it was far from the only time)) was when Mr Hawkins – an absolute legend of a teacher, don’t get me wrong – tried to explain that 3.45 rounded up to 4 because you’d round up to 3.5 and then up to 4.