July 28, 2009
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The Mathcast, Yoak, answers, guests, logic, math puzzles, numbers
Man, what is it with puzzlers and prisoners? Jeff Yoak lines ‘em up and the stakes are high in this week’s puzzle.
Also, we are now twittering at MathFactor; each of the authors has an account of his own; mine is CGoodmanStrauss. You can tag solutions and comments with #mathfactor. See you there!
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July 28, 2009
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The Mathcast, Yoak, answers, guests, logic, math puzzles, numbers
How can three people, each required to guess the color of hat on their head, strategize and maximize the chances they’ll all be right?
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December 1, 2008
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Favorites, The Mathcast, logic, math puzzles, toys and math products
Our favorite new and not-so-new products of 2008!

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Check out these great gifts!
- Zome is an incredibly powerful construction system!
- the great puzzles of Puzzellation (available at Barnes and Nobles)
- The terrific puzzle computer game DROD
- The Magic Mirror Image Coloring Book
- The Riddles of the Sphinx by David J Bodycombe, an amazing compendium of puzzles, of hundreds of kinds, at all levels of difficulty, with historical essays to boot!
- Which leads us to Nikoli, the great Japanese puzzle co! (Rules can be found here)
- The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is a landmark classic. A must-have for every serious student, researcher or amateur.
- How Round is Your Circle just one of the many fantastic titles out on Princeton University Press
- AK Peters is another fantastic press, with a wide range of interesting math and CS titles, including, ahem, the Symmetries of Things.
- Binary Arts/ThinkFun is another source of great puzzles!
- And the authors Martin Gardner and Ivan Moscovitch are always fantastic!
Hope this helps and have fun!! Let us know how it works out!
Happy Holidays from the Math Factor!
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August 16, 2008
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Follow Up, answers, infinity, logic, paradoxes
That the worm falls off the end of the rope depends on the fact that the incredible
harmonic series
1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + . . .
diverges to infinity, growing as large as you please!
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August 12, 2008
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Favorites, The Mathcast, Topology and geometry, guests, infinity, logic, math puzzles, numbers, paradoxes

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Dana Richards, editor of The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems discusses the amazing Martin Gardner and his legacy!
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July 1, 2008
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The Mathcast, logic, numbers, paradoxes

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Faster than an exponential! More powerful than double factorials!! The Busy Beaver Function tops anything that could ever be computed– and we mean ever
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June 22, 2008
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The Mathcast, logic, numbers

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Those dumb robots can do anything! Anything at all, that any computer can do.
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June 12, 2008
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The Mathcast, logic, paradoxes
One of the great discoveries of the twentieth century is that mathematics can describe the limits of mathematical thought! We’ll discuss some of these ideas from time to time in coming weeks. In this segment, we consider Alan Turing’s insightful question:
Can the answer to any mathematical question be computed?
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May 5, 2008
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The Mathcast, answers, logic
We explore Barry Cipra’s Tag Deal a bit more…
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