This interesting problem comes from Colin Hughes at the Maths Challenge website.
“Problem
Prove that for any number that is not a multiple of seven, then its cube will be one more or one less than a multiple of 7.”
See Lucky 7 Problem
This interesting problem comes from Colin Hughes at the Maths Challenge website.
“Problem
Prove that for any number that is not a multiple of seven, then its cube will be one more or one less than a multiple of 7.”
See Lucky 7 Problem
A glutton for punishment I considered another Sam Loyd puzzle:
“Three men had a tandem and wished to go just forty miles. It could complete the journey with two passengers in one hour, but could not carry the three persons at one time. Well, one who was a good pedestrian, could walk at the rate of a mile in ten minutes; another could walk in fifteen minutes, and the other in twenty. What would be the best possible time in which all three could get to the end of their journey?”
See the Tandem Bicycle Puzzle.
This is from the UKMT Senior Challenge of 2004.
“L, M, and N are midpoints of a skeleton cube, as shown. What is the value of angle LMN?
_____A_90°_____B_105°_____C_120°_____D_135°_____E_150°”
This statement showed up recently at Futility Closet and I found it to be another one of those magical results that seemed so surprising. I don’t recall ever seeing this before.
“The radius of a circle inscribed in a 3-4-5 triangle is 1.
(In fact, the inradius of any Pythagorean triangle is an integer.)”
(A Pythagorean triangle is a right triangle whose sides form a Pythagorean triple.) Futility Closet left these remarkable statements unproven, so naturally I felt I had to provide a proof.
In my search for new problems I came across this one from Martin Gardner:
“A square formation of Army cadets, 50 feet on the side, is marching forward at a constant pace [see Figure]. The company mascot, a small terrier, starts at the center of the rear rank [position A in the illustration], trots forward in a straight line to the center of the front rank [position B], then trots back again in a straight line to the center of the rear. At the instant he returns to position A, the cadets have advanced exactly 50 feet. Assuming that the dog trots at a constant speed and loses no time in turning, how many feet does he travel?”
Gardner gives a follow-up problem that is virtually impossible:
“If you solve this problem, which calls for no more than a knowledge of elementary algebra, you may wish to tackle a much more difficult version proposed by the famous puzzlist Sam Loyd. Instead of moving forward and back through the marching cadets, the mascot trots with constant speed around the outside of the square, keeping as close as possible to the square at all times. (For the problem we assume that he trots along the perimeter of the square.) As before, the formation has marched 50 feet by the time the dog returns to point A. How long is the dog’s path?”
See the Marching Cadets and Dog Problem.
This is a delightful little problem from Dick Hess that exercises one’s basic facility with logarithms:
“Define x as
Find an expression for
in terms of x where the only constants appearing are integers.”
See the Logging Problem
I was reading yet another book on the Scientific Revolution when I came across a discussion of the mathematical significance of the invention of perspective for painting in the 15th century Italian Renaissance. The main player in the saga was Leon Battista Alberti (1404 – 1472) and his tome De Pictura (On Painting) (1435-6), which contained the first mathematical presentation of perspective. Even though mathematics was advertised, it was not at the level of trigonometry I used in my post “The Perspective Map”, but rather entailed simple Euclidean plane geometry. So the discussion was largely historical rather than mathematical. Nevertheless, I became curious to learn how much Alberti was able to discover about perspective without a lot of math. This essay is the result.
See Alberti’s Perspective Construction
(Update 7/29/2019) I got a response! Continue reading