Monday Math Madness #2 now at Blinkdagger
Blinkdagger has posted the second Monday Math Madness contest. It has a fun St. Patrick's Day theme. Check it out!
You've got a week to solve this problem and send in your well-explained solution. The Blinkdagger guys are giving out $10 in Amazon gift certificate cash to a randomly-selected winner.
April 7th will be the next contest at Wild About Math! I'll be giving away something more fun that cash next time so check back here but solve the Blinkdagger St. Patty's Day problem first.
Monday Math Madness: We have a winner!
For the very first Monday Math Madness contest we got 13 submissions. Of the 13, 6 were correct. For the record, I solved the problem by enumerating the various cases where 3 categories were represented and computing and adding their probabilities. I also verified my solution to the problem by writing a computer program to enumerate all 243 (3^5) permutations of 3 categories and 5 blog posts and count the ones were all 3 blog categories were represented. So, I'm pretty confident I got the right answer 
Keep those Monday Math Madness answers coming!
Four of you have submitted answers to Monday Math Madness so far but only two of them are correct. Remember, the Blinkdagger guys and I are picking a good random answer, not the first good answer. So, you've all still got a chance to win $10 to Amazon.
Heather, from the 360 blog, gave the problem to one of her classes to solve, and told them how to submit their answers. So, if you've got Math students who have learned some probability then have them try their hand at this problem. It's not super difficult but it's tricky enough that only half the solutions submitted were correct.
You all have until Sunday night to get your submissions in. And, if you don't like this problem or miss the deadline, Blinkdagger will be running the next contest, starting in 12 days.
Happy problem solving!
Monday Math Madness is here!
I was contacted last week by a couple of Matlab geeks, Quan and Daniel, who have started a 
blog, Blinkdagger, about co-sponsoring an ongoing Math contest. Now, I was a little confused because I think these guys are engineers, and I didn't know that engineers took Math classes (Maybe these guys learned Calculus in the 4th grade.) Anyway, their email got past my spam filter so I figured this relationship was meant to be! So, (drum roll, please), Blinkdagger and Wild About Math! have teamed up to post fun Math puzzles on the 1st and 3rd Monday of every month. There'll be a prize for the best combination of randomly selected right answer plus good explanation of how you got your answer.
Coming soon to a blog near you …
Something new is coming to the blogosphere. It's Monday Math Madness!
Stay tuned for details ...
Diabolical geometry problem
While surfing the web I discovered this: World's Hardest Easy Geometry Problem. There's actually two geometry problems on the page. Apparently these are classic problems that have tortured students for a long time. I spent a little bit of time working on the first, and even looking at the two hints, and didn't solve it.
Give it a try.
Math contest problem page created
I've created a new page, Math contest problem links. It lists a number of contest sites. Some of the pages have links to lots of other sites. I'll list more as I discover them.
The impetus for this page is that I like to sometimes find an interesting problem to chew on without having to spend time Googling for Math contest sites. I tried, whenever possible, to link to the page that has problems on it, not the home page for the site. So, hopefully I'll save everyone some searching and clicking.
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