Wild About Math! Making Math fun and accessible

Tanton tantalizes with an Euler gem

James Tanton has produced another great video, this one on a very intriguing partitioning problem with a very clever solution.

There are four ways to break the number 6 down into a sum of distinct numbers: 6 = 5+1 = 4+2 = 3+2+1. There are four ways to break the number of 6 down into odd numbers: 5+1 = 3+3 = 3+1+1=1 = 1+1+1+1+1+1. It is no coincidence that the count of ways are the same. In 1740 Euler proved it will always be so! His proof is ingenious and here it is! I've also added a challenge at the end to discover other bizarre results like this one. (I bet you can do it!)

I thoroughly enjoy Tanton's ability to find interesting problems and make them accessible to those of us who aren't professional mathematicians. In fact, all of Tanton's videos are accessible to motivated high school students.

I was delighted to see Mr. Tanton included in Math Pickle's page of inspired people.

A MathPickle guy to the core - James Tanton is a fully fledged mathematician with a fantastic web site that offers videos for school teachers and first year university lecturers. Visit his web site here.