A Mathematician's Holiday: Recent Episodes
Oxford University
Journey with the Mathemagicians as they encounter a number of problems on their travels and use mathematics to find solutions. The series of short videos is suitable for secondary school teachers, introducing various maths principles to students in an engaging way.
Given four bottles with indistinguishable liquid, one of which is a vital medicine, two containers and a test that can be done only once, how can you determine which of the the bottles contain the medicine?
In a restaurant where you can order tasting plates of 10 items, what is the smallest number of plates you can order to identify all 10 items on a menu?
By drawing on a piece of paper, can you connect three houses to three utilities (gas, electricity, water) without any of the lines crossing?
How can you get three people to the upper floor of the hotel if two of them can never be left alone?
What is the quickest route to get from where you are standing, collect some water from a river and get to the hotel?
Three bags contain 2 t-shirts or 2 hoodies or 1 hoodie and 1 t-shirt, and none are labelled correctly. Can you tell which back belongs to whom by only taking one (random) item from one bag?
What is the quickest route between two points, if you can only cross the runways at a perpendicular?
How do we measure out 100ml of a liquid using only containers taking quantities of 75ml, 125ml and 200ml?
How do you construct a tour travelling between a number of different cities, but never using the same transport method between two cities more than once?