https://www.amazon.com/Moscow-Puzzles-Mathematical-Recreatio...
Does New Year's Day fall more often on a Saturday or a Sunday?
Do you recall the solution? It seems like a tricky problem. No approach occurs to me aside from a brute force analysis of the 400 year Gregorian calendar cycle, accounting for the complete leap year rules (under which, e.g., 1900 was not a leap year but 2000 was).
const counts = Array(7).fill(0);
for (let year = 2000; year < 2400; year++) {
counts[new Date(year, 0, 1).getDay()]++;
}
console.log(`Number of Saturdays: ${counts[6]}; Number of Sundays: ${counts[0]}`);
Number of Saturdays: 56; Number of Sundays: 58
To check, see this 5-line brute-force calculation in JavaScript: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42024474
Unix was born to play games. And Curses was born for Rogue.
Please correct me if I am wrong but I thought this was only the reason for the predecessor of it on the PDP-7: Thompson wanted Space Travel to run on the PDP-7 and the necessary boilerplate became a rudimentary OS. But porting this to the PDP-11 was not motivated by Space Travel -- or was it?
Though games are perhaps a subset of simulation in general (even if their simulation might be of an imaginary world rather than the real one.)
As a youngster they were a source of wonder to me.
Edit: found it, it's called "Martin Gardner s Mathematical Games: The Entire Collection of His Scientific American Columns"
Cambridge University Press also started on a project to revise and re-release all of it but that stalled out, they published four books.
https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/mathem...
In the present time, I find Simon Singh’s parallel.co.uk has been doing interesting work holding weekly math circles for kids - deftly engaging kids with mathematical ideas. I attend a circle with my 9 yo every Sunday.
> Simon Singh’s parallel.co.uk
I'm curious what the age range is? My son is 8.
2nd person singular should be "amas". :)
[1] https://archive.org/details/bellumhelvetiumf00lowe/page/203/
He goes on to say that it resembles a household item. I can visualise the shape, but I can't think of anything that it looks like. Does anyone know what item it is?
There's a picture here:
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1947363/is-there-a-...
https://deepfriedhoodsiecups.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/dfhc-7...
i got a copy of that book and gardner's "mathematical magic show" when i was 12 or so, and they both continue to entertain and delight me.
"A carpenter, working with a buzz saw, wishes to cut a wooden cube, three inches on a side, into 27 one-inch cubes. He can do this job easily by making six cuts through the cube, keeping the pieces together in the cube shape. Can he reduce the number of necessary cuts by rearranging the pieces after each cut? Either show how or prove that it’s impossible."
- Martin Gardener
alias rot13="tr 'A-Za-z' 'N-ZA-Mn-za-m'"
echo "Lbh arrq fvk phgf orpnhfr lbh arrq gb rkcbfr rirel snpr bs gur prageny phor." | rot13
ChatGPT 4o mini kept getting one of the words wrong, funnily enough
for recreational math:
https://www.gathering4gardner.org/
They have conferences and talks and post on youtube:
https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/scientific-american-go...
It would be nice if he, instead, had more numbers about what types of articles Scientific American started running over the past decade, showing a move towards "going woke" as he puts it.
As it is, it just sounds like he's mad that his article was rejected.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/09/scie...
Then ask them about the change is murder rates in poor communities that resulted from the police defunding movement.
While the dems may lean slightly more toward science than the GOP on some issues, their science is also a cudgel for cultural issues.
https://dailynous.com/2018/09/13/scientific-american-trustwo...