Archive for the ‘Probability’ Category

Monday Math Madness #9

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Last Friday Blinkdagger announced a winner for MMM #8. Here's MMM #9: 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 number as is 346125. 112345 is not such a number since ...

A very clever way to solve the first Monday Math Madness problem

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

On March 3rd Blinkdagger and I posted the first Monday Math Madness problem. On March 11th, after the first contest ended, I posted a couple of different solutions to the problem. Pat Ballew, even though he wasn't picked as the random winner, impressed me with a very clever solution to ...

Monday Math Madness: We have a winner!

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

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 ...

Probability and divisibility by 30

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

Well, probability is on my mind - this sounds like a great song title, no? I've got another probability problem, this one presented to me by my brother Abe as I called him from the airport half way to my awesome vacation in Hawaii. I chewed on it for a little ...

Fun calendar probability problem

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

I picked up a little gem from Math Wonders to Inspire Teachers and Students, by Alfred Posamentier. The book, by the way, is outstanding. Posamentier has become one of my heroes for writing books that awe and inspire students and teachers to get, well, Wild About Math! Someday I will ...