… there is no reason to feel that someone must be “bad at math” to make mistakes. Clearly, if a mathematician can have a foggy day, then so can others. It doesn’t mean you’re “bad at math.”
[...]
|
||||||
|
As much as I like puzzles, I’ve come to think of math as about the ultimate puzzle. Not in the sense of it being confusing (because by its nature it aims at reducing confusion and creating clarity), but in the sense that it has logical rules but requires creativity to understand and use in any meaningful sense . [...] Today is Martin Gardner’s 95th birthday. [...] There are many things to be aware of when doing these kinds of “tests.” First is that they are a scam to get you to give them your cell phone number, so they can then spam you with tons of crap you are not interested in. [...] My team-mate (my wife) and I had been stumped by a corner of the puzzle from last Friday. It was driving us nuts (who the heck is Al Leitner?). Anyway, we usually get ‘em all within a day or two, but this one was tough, so I hit the web and googled some clues. I don’t like to cheat (OK, I do, but my wife has a little more backbone than I, and she usually won’t let me look up an answer until we’ve given it a few days). [...]
Original Photo by Norsehorse Edited by Brian Ah, I love it when readers beat me to the punch! The comments to the original post pretty much sum up the paradox and it’s solution very well. Khaled’s and Mark’s comments illustrate perfectly one of the things I wanted to point out about this puzzle. That point is: Just because something is phrased a certain way is not reason to assume that that phrasing is the best way to represent the problem. And one way to critically examine the situation is to reframe it in a mathematical equation. Khaled said, “Interesting how, once you assume that you can implicitly trust a given source, you can be led through any logic, or illogic, and have a lot of trouble pulling yourself back to a critical mindset.” How true. Then Mark gave a good method to understand how to see where the paradox lies when he said, “I started to write an equation, because properly written equations can solve all counting problems, but then realized that this was pointless, because adding 2 dollars to the 27 dollars the guests paid did not reflect what happened.” Exactly! The question was phrased to lead you to believe that because the facts were a certain way (which it accurately represented) you had to see it in a certain way (which was anything but accurate). Continue reading Math Puzzle – Case of the Missing Dollar(?) Part 2 (The Flip Side) →
Original Photo by Norsehorse Edited by Brian There’s a braintwister that’s been going around the internet, well, probably ever since there was an internet. It’s actually probably thousands of years old in one version or another. You may have seen it phrased like this: Three men go into a motel. The man behind the desk said that [...] This post is concerned with a very interesting problem, called “The Traveler’s Dilemma.” There is a very good article about it, written by it’s creator, Professor Kaushik Basu, in the June, 2007 issue of the Scientific American. The article begins: “When playing this simple game, people consistently reject the rational choice. In fact, by acting illogically, they end up reaping a larger reward–an outcome that demands a new kind of formal reasoning.” Maybe you are one of the lucky (such a subjective word!) ones who got the Math Mojo Monthly Newsletter (“Comes out Monthly, Mostly!”) today. I finally sent it out to a few hundred subscribers. I hope you like it. The lesson of the week was about a cool way to convert Celcius to Fahrenheit, and vice-versa. The Professor is busting his head trying to learn about relational databases today. I’m trying to make sure the site runs smoother by getting my programming skills together. Hotcha! Speaking of hotcha! – are any of you mathmojoers or mojoettes out there into sudoku? Man, is that addictive! It seems like there is a choice – either get your work done, or get good at sudoku. I’m getting to the “black belt” stage, but s-l-o-w-l-y. Here’s a tip for beginners – you might want to bite the bullet and actually read about some strategy. I know that is helping me a lot. One link for beginners is http://www.saidwhat.co.uk/sudokus/sudokustrategy.php You can find another good tutorial at http://www.nikoli.co.jp/puzzles/1/index-e.htm. That last link is a link to the company that made sudoku popular in Japan. Nikoli is famous for having all of it’s sudoku puzzles made by hand. Since gold coins (if they are gold coins, and not some hybrid – and the question did say “gold coins”) are valued by their weight, it stands to reason that a $5 gold coin is worth half of a $10 gold coin. [...] |
 |
||||
|
Copyright Magic and Learning; 2010 - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
