Math Forum / Mathematics / Recreational Math / November 2006

It is well known that it is possible to
cut a square in 7 different rectangles with the same
area. This is known as Blanche's Dissections.
see <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BlanchesDissection.html>

I thank Frank J. Lhota for bringing Marilyn vos Savant's
latest variation on the Monty Hall problem to our attention.
When I saw it in Parade magazine, I read over it quickly,
thought I knew it from before, and passed over it.

To the math concerned (from a newly math concerned person):
I'm kind of math challenged.  Even so, I'm involved in something that
requires math.  Although I don't believe that I've reached my level of
incompetence, there are others (plenty of them, believe me) who think

Lo and behold, an alian binary operator is upon us:  n mod m
n mod m takes two integers and produces another.
When n or m is negative, native computeriod languages different upon
result.  Consequently we shall discard discussion of such until an

Question:  Can this be a fair contest?
Fishing Contest Objective...
Find the 12 best fishermen with the most desirable fish
Fish caught and landed "C"

Last December, I started a thread on a proposed recursive casino game.
This lively thread resulted in a rather detailed analysis of the game.
One of the participants, Henry Bottomley, has written a paper
summarizing the results of this thread, as well as expanding his work on

The area of a regular n-gon which is inscribed in a circle C is x square units. If a similar regular n-gon is circumscribed about circle C has an area of 2x square units find a value for n.

A Langford/Skolem-like sequence, with a mixture of odd and even terms
-- plus two questions unanswered yet on SeqFans:
http://www.cetteadressecomportecinquantesignes.com/OddEvenSkol.htm
Best,

The Enigma puzzle in the 21 October 2006 New Scientist
magazine, a British publication, is titled "World Series" and reads:
==QUOTE==
Baseball's so-called World Series is won by the first of the

Estimate the quantity of the wheat grains to put on the last square of
the chessboard
Detail is here
http://www.studyandjobs.com/Chess_grain.html

I was wondering what the two dimensional inhabitants of a flatland would see
if they came to the edge of their world - say these 2D people lived on disk
or a Moebius strip.
My immediate thought was that they would see a black line - a wall in 2D

[jstevh@msn.com]

[Tim Peters]

I have the function:
    f(x) = N^(1-p) * x^p;  0<p<1;  N<0
which will map (0,N) onto (0,N) such that x<=f(x)<=N. That is, f(x)
always gives me a new value that is larger than x but smaller than N.

Greetings from dark and sleeping Holland!
I have published a new math puzzle today, to be found at
http://home.planet.nl/~p.j.hendriks/ppvdw.htm (click on the Union
Jack).

A positive integer written in a given base b is said to be
'rising' if each digit is larger than the digit to its left.
For convenient notation, we denote by R(b,m) the number
of rising base-b positive integers that are m digits long.