What is the smallest number of socks you must take out of the drawer in order to be certain that you have a pair that match?
The room is in pitch darkness and you want two matching socks. The 20 socks are exactly alike except for their colour. Ten red socks and ten blue socks are all mixed up in a dresser drawer. You are to make one cut (or draw one line) – of course it needn’t be straight – that will divide the figure into two identical parts. I’ll post the answers in a few days … but by then you will have solved them all, right? Gardner wrote dozens of books on puzzles and recreational maths – here are eight puzzles taken from them. “Puzzles can lead you into almost every branch of mathematics,” he added.Īnd Martin Gardner was without parallel in being able to show how true that was. Puzzles both provoke creative thinking and are a starting point for interesting research. “They are trying to solve puzzles about the nature of the universe.” “A puzzle in a sense models what all scientists are doing,” he said. There is a difference between being good at puzzles and appreciating a good puzzle. Yet when we continued the discussion I realised that my analogies were wrong. It was as if Pelé had told me he didn’t like playing football, or Jamie Oliver that he wasn’t bothered about food. I asked him if he enjoyed solving puzzles? In his monthly column Mathematical Games, which he wrote in Scientific American between the 1950s and the 1980s, he introduced many brainteasers as well as giving old classics new twists.
Yet he was probably best known – and most loved – for popularising mathematical puzzles. Gardner was a journalist, a novelist, a magician, a philosopher and one of the earliest public debunkers of pseudoscience.
0 kommentar(er)
