The Math Factor Podcast: Recent Episodes
The Math Factor Podcast
I recently returned from the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland Oregon. In the final talk of the event, Paul Fenwick, always an amazing presenter, offered a puzzle during his talk that I thought I’d share. I will offer the puzzle below, but the best way to experience it is to watch Paul’s talk, Mindware […]
A friend posed this to me today: Devise an alternate set of denominations for coins and bank notes requiring a minimum number of denominations and such that any amount from $0.01 to $100 could be paid with four units of currency. I’ve looked at this from another perspective before after it was discussed on Freakonomics […]
Colm Mulcahy, of Spelman College in Atlanta, joins us to share his ice cream trick from his CardColm mathematical card trick column on the MAA website! You’re invited to explain how this works in the comments below. Colm also shares a quick puzzle, tweeted on his What Would Martin Gardner Tweet feed @WWMGT. And finally […]
Farewell Tom Rodgers, founder, visionary and force behind the Gathering For Gardner. He has added a lot to the world and his legacy will go on and spread. In that spirit, we all hope you’ll join in the Celebration of Mind, maybe hosting your own event sometime around Martin Gardner’s birthday each year on October 21! […]
A break from puzzling to discuss the history of the great Newton-Liebnitz dispute over the invention of Calculus, with the playwright Todd Taylor.
For procrastinators only, we celebrate √10 day! And we pose a new puzzle: The number of 1’s in this quiz is ____ The number of 2’s in this quiz is ____ The number of 3’s in this quiz is ____ The number of 4’s in this quiz is ____ There are actually two solutions to […]
We all know this feeling: someone’s in your seat, and now you’re the nutcase who’s going to take someone else’s seat. After all that what’s the probability the last person on the plane will be able to sit in the correct seat? The three number trick is just a simple version of this one (but here it […]
In which we discuss still more 2012 facts—Matt Zinno points out that we are emerging from a spell of years with repeated digits, and in fact this is just about the longest run in the last 1000 years! (So, folks, enjoy working out other long spells!) Ben Anderman shares his online Princess-and-Suitor app. And […]
Let’s see: First, the “Big News“, a discussion of Carlos May, and another puzzle (a pretty easy one) And still more 2012 facts! From Primepuzzles.net, we learn that 2012 = (1+2-3+4)(5-6+78*9) and there’s still more amazing stuff there that we didn’t try to read on the air.
Happy Palindrome Day! (For some of us) Many listeners will have heard about the hunter who walks one mile south, one mile east, then one mile north—and is right back where he started. But in fact there are infinitely many places on the Earth where he could be, and in at least a couple of […]