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Mice and Wine
This is one of my favorite problems: You’re planning a huge party for tomorrow, which will include a toast exactly 24 hours from this moment. You have 1000 bottles of wine, but one of them is...
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Giuseppe’s Fingers
I assigned the following problem last week in my class: Giuseppe likes to count on the fingers of his left hand, but in a peculiar way. He starts by calling the thumb 1, the first finger 2, the middle...
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Learning to Read
Yes, this is math class, but especially in a problems-based curriculum we are teaching reading at the same time, right? I recently gave two classes the following problem*: “How many triangles are there...
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Mimi, I am that student.
Yesterday I opened class with this question, taken from the University of Maryland High School Mathematics Competition (2005): What is the value of log (2/1) + log(3/2) + log(4/3) + … + log(99/98) +...
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The Problem That Never Fails
[This post also appears as a guest post over at Sam Shah's blog.] This is a post about a problem that never fails. It’s the problem I used for my sample lesson when interviewing for jobs four years...
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Postgame Analysis: the Towers of Hanoi
I recently gave my juniors the classic Towers of Hanoi puzzle to play with in small groups. It went something like this: You have three plates, and plate #1 has a stack of 5 pancakes, in order from...
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The Perfect Combinatorics Problem
In this post, I’m going to extol the virtues of my favorite combinatorics problem. You’ve probably heard it, or some version of it, before: A pizza parlor offers ten different toppings on their pizza....
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