Archive for the ‘Algebra’ Category

12 cent Math trick

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Here's a very interesting and simple trick to impress your friends. It's simple enough to do that even the little ones, if they can count to 12, can do this trick. There's no sleight of hand or any other difficult manipulation to do. In fact, once you know the very ...

William Wallace creates a fun Math puzzle

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

William Wallace sent me the following email so I'm inspired to promote his puzzle: I came across your math blog, and thought you might be interested in a puzzle I came up with. To see how it works, go to (http://blog.coincidencetheories.com/?p=1522). You probably can figure it out first, then go verify. ...

MMM #25: Monotonous Monday Math Madness

Friday, January 30th, 2009

[ See below for MMM #25 ] Blinkdagger has announced the winner for MMM #24 and I've got a new problem so keep reading. Rich Berlin noticed the relationship to MMM #1 and submitted an interesting solution, based on Pat Ballew's Markov chain process which I wrote about in March. The technique for ...

A simple but disturbing Math problem

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

My brother gave me a Math problem this morning. He and I both know how to solve it but we're both disturbed by the fact that the right answer seems unintuitive. I'm interested to see if one of you can explain the answer in a way that is intuitive. Here's the ...

Math doesn’t suck

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

When the Penguin Group publishing company contacted me to see if I was interested in reviewing Danica McKellar's popular books, Math Doesn't Suck, and Kiss My Math, I jumped at the chance. No, it wasn't for the free books. The time I spend reading and writing doesn't justify the cost ...

MMM #15: We have a winner!

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Richard Berlin, who has been participating in Monday Math Madness! for quite a while, was picked as the winner for this contest by Random.org. Congratulations, Richard! I'll be sending you your prize so send me your address. Stand by for another Monday Math Madness on Monday at Blinkdagger. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "MMM #15: ...

Monday Math Madness #11

Monday, July 21st, 2008

MMM #11 is a variation on MMM #9. I promise I won't do any more variations on this problem after this one! Consider all of the 6-digit numbers that one can construct using each of the digits between 1 and 6 inclusively exactly one time each. 123456 is such a ...

Ti-Nspire inspires Math students

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

A while ago I received an email out of the blue from Texas Instruments (TI). One of their marketing people discovered this blog and offered to send me a TI-Nspire calculator to review. I quickly accepted, after all, who would turn down a free fancy calculator, right? Once I received ...

Monday Math Madness #7

Monday, May 26th, 2008

It's time for Monday Math Madness #7. I love infinite series and I found today's infinite series problem on the web. This is one of the most interesting of these kinds of problems I have run into. It's challenging but not brutally difficult, so give it a try. I won't ...

A hard but fascinating Math problem

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

I ran into the following problem in a contest problem book. I won't reveal the source until later. I was not able to solve this problem and even though the solution is in the back of the book so I know how to solve it now, I'd like to see ...