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Don’t trust your intuition part 4: The bat and ball puzzle
Read more: Don’t trust your intuition part 4: The bat and ball puzzleThe bat and ball puzzle is almost everywhere and you may well have seen it: Please answer this question before you read on. Your first guess This puzzle has been given to many university students and the majority answer: “The ball costs 10 cents.” Unfortunately, this is incorrect! This is an illustration of what Nobel…
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What’s the Difference?
Read more: What’s the Difference?This post departs from the pattern of presenting an interesting concept from number theory or presenting a solution to a classic problem. We will look at a basic concept and at understanding it in a way that makes some daily mathematical tasks simpler. The concept is difference or the result of subtracting one number from…
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The handshake problem: Couples edition!
Read more: The handshake problem: Couples edition!We have already seen the classical form of the handshake problem, where we asked: If there were 10 people at a party and every person were to shake hands with every other person exactly once, how many handshakes would there be in total? In this post, we will solve the problem but with people arriving…
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Never divide by zero!
Read more: Never divide by zero!You may have heard that division by zero is not allowed. In fact, if you try to divide any number by zero on a calculator, you will get a version of “undefined”. This post will show why this is the case and relate one maritime mishap that happened as a result of an attempt to…
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The Easter Bunny Needs Your Help
Read more: The Easter Bunny Needs Your HelpThe Easter Bunny is very polite. He isn’t one to enter people’s homes through roof cavities in the middle of the night! Instead, he knocks on the front door during daytime. Often, this involves climbing up a set of stairs to get to the front porch. The Easter Bunny can hop either 1 or 2…
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Prime numbers: Fascinating to mathematicians, life-saving for cicadas!
Read more: Prime numbers: Fascinating to mathematicians, life-saving for cicadas!What are prime numbers? Prime numbers are the building blocks of all other numbers. They have distinctive qualities that mathematicians get excited about. In this post, we will see what prime numbers are and discuss how cicadas exploit them to avoid predators and thrive! Having seen factors in a previous post, we can define a…
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Numbers can be friends, perfect ones too!
Read more: Numbers can be friends, perfect ones too!Factors Since 2 3=6, then 2 and 3 are said to be factors of 6. 1 and 6 are another pair of factors of 6. In fact, all positive whole numbers have 1 and themselves as factors. In summary, the factors of 6 are 1, 2, 3, and 6. Excluding the number itself, 1, 2…
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Why you should be excited about Pi Day!
Read more: Why you should be excited about Pi Day!Star Wars geeks celebrate May the 4th, but today is for all of us, geeks and non-geeks alike! Allow my friend, Steven Francis, and me to convince you to celebrate Pi Day by consuming an irresponsible quantity of pizza or a responsible quantity of beer! Today’s date is March 14. On an American calendar, it…
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Don’t trust your intuition, part 3: Exponential growth
Read more: Don’t trust your intuition, part 3: Exponential growthThere is a widely clipped and shared video of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson asking the question: There is algae growing on a lake, you see that the area covered by the algae doubles every day. You go away for a month, come back and see that half of the area of the lake is covered…
Numbers for Words people is a blog that explains mathematics in plain language. The aim is to show the beauty of mathematics from first principles. For regular updates, subscribe by typing your email address in the box at the top of the page.