Interactive Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles
Raymond Smullyan, a Mathematician, Philosopher and author of several outstanding books of logical puzzles, tells, in one of his books, a revealing story. A friend invited him for dinner. He told Smullyan that his teenage son was crazy about Smullyan's books and could not wait to meet him. The friend warned Smullyan not to mention that he is a Mathematician and that Logic is a part of Mathematics because the young fellow hated Mathematics.
Having told this story, would it be wise to announce up front what this site is about? Perhaps against a better judgement, I've put together a manifesto that aims to explain the purpose of this site.
By the way, did you know that...
- You are wrong if you think Mathematics is not fun
- There exist triangular numbers that are also square
- You are wrong if you think Mathematics is not fun
- A clock never showing right time might be preferable to the one showing right time twice a day
- There are many things that can be multiplied
- Every composite number is the product of some factors and also the sum of the same numbers
- Complex numbers are in a sense perfect while there is little doubt that perfect numbers are complex
- To get cafe au lait one should carry coffee to milk and not milk to coffee
- You can't add apples and oranges but you can add their shapes
- A straight line has dimension 1, a plane 2. Fractals have mostly fractional dimension
- Sphere has two sides. However, there are one-sided surfaces
- Everything you can do with a ruler and a compass you can do with the compass alone
- You can position 10 defenders of a square castle so that on every side there will be 5 men
- Two simple polygons of equal area can be dissected into a finite number of congruent polygons
- Simple quadrilaterals tessellate the plane
- One is morally obligated not to do anything impossible
- In some circumstances, an index may have a content of its own
- In a group of 23 people, at least two have the same birthday with the probability greater than 1/2
- Among all shapes with the same area circle has the shortest perimeter
- There is something the dead eat but if the living eat it, they die
Last updated: July 6, 2018 What has changed? |
|Contact| |Front page| |Index|
Copyright © 1996-2017 Alexander Bogomolny