[HN Gopher] Math and puzzle fans find magic in Martin Gardner's ...
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Math and puzzle fans find magic in Martin Gardner's legacy
Author : ColinWright
Score : 118 points
Date : 2024-10-30 09:51 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| ykonstant wrote:
| Another fantastic resource is Boris Kordemsky's book The Moscow
| Puzzles:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Moscow-Puzzles-Mathematical-Recreatio...
| I_complete_me wrote:
| I think it was this book where I first saw the puzzle:
| Does New Year's Day fall more often on a Saturday or a Sunday?
|
| Such a simple puzzle with to (then) me such depth of knowledge
| to uncover the answer.
| bumbledraven wrote:
| I don't see it there:
| https://archive.org/details/boris-a.-kordemsky-the-moscow-
| pu...
|
| Do you recall the solution? It seems like a tricky problem.
| No approach occurs to me aside from a brute force analysis of
| the 400 year Gregorian calendar cycle, accounting for the
| complete leap year rules (under which, e.g., 1900 was not a
| leap year but 2000 was).
| bumbledraven wrote:
| It turns out that New Year's Day is a bit more likely to
| fall on Sunday than Saturday. To confirm, here's a bit of
| simple JavaScript that checks a complete 400-year cycle.
| You can run it in your browser's console:
| const counts = Array(7).fill(0); for (let year =
| 2000; year < 2400; year++) { counts[new Date(year,
| 0, 1).getDay()]++; } console.log(`Number of
| Saturdays: ${counts[6]}; Number of Sundays: ${counts[0]}`);
|
| Output: Number of Saturdays: 56; Number of
| Sundays: 58
|
| Note: getDay() returns 0 for Sunday and 6 for Saturday
| (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...).
| tromp wrote:
| Unless you're considering a limited date range, it should
| fall equally often on both in the limit since neither 365 nor
| 366 (leap year) are multiples of 7.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| So you'd think that, and it is approximately true. But the
| calendar repeats every 400 years (there are 97 leap years
| in 400, and 497 is a multiple of 7). And 400 isn't a
| multiple of 7, so you can't have it work out exactly.
| tromp wrote:
| But if the pair of (date, weekday) repeats every 400*7
| years, then it still works out exactly?!
| bumbledraven wrote:
| In the Gregorian calendar, January 1 falls on a Saturday
| in any year that is a multiple of 400. (This follows from
| any correct day-of-the-week algorithm, such as
| https://firstsundaydoomsday.blogspot.com/2009/12/quick-
| start....) Since each 400-year cycle begins on the same
| day, rather than balancing out, any imbalances would
| actually _accumulate_.
|
| To check, see this 5-line brute-force calculation in
| JavaScript: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42024474
| jeifneioka wrote:
| Don't forget Raymond Smullyan.
| lanstin wrote:
| The Lady and the Tiger.
| zem wrote:
| and ian stewart!
| anthk wrote:
| Recreational math and games boosted both computing and science.
|
| Unix was born to play games. And Curses was born for Rogue.
| chx wrote:
| > Unix was born to play games
|
| Please correct me if I am wrong but I thought this was only the
| reason for the predecessor of it on the PDP-7: Thompson wanted
| Space Travel to run on the PDP-7 and the necessary boilerplate
| became a rudimentary OS. But porting this to the PDP-11 was not
| motivated by Space Travel -- or was it?
| beardyw wrote:
| All of his Scientific American articles were available as a CD I
| have. Not sure if they are online yet.
|
| As a youngster they were a source of wonder to me.
| glimshe wrote:
| What is this CD? I like old compilations.
|
| Edit: found it, it's called "Martin Gardner s Mathematical
| Games: The Entire Collection of His Scientific American
| Columns"
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://bookstore.ams.org/view?ProductCode=GARDNER-SET
|
| Cambridge University Press also started on a project to revise
| and re-release all of it but that stalled out, they published
| four books.
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/mathem...
| smath wrote:
| Gardeners books and sci-am columns are an amazing resource to get
| kids and teens interested in math.
|
| In the present time, I find Simon Singh's parallel.co.uk has been
| doing interesting work holding weekly math circles for kids -
| deftly engaging kids with mathematical ideas. I attend a circle
| with my 9 yo every Sunday.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| > Simon Singh's parallel.co.uk
|
| Perhaps you mean https://parallel.org.uk/ ?
|
| I'm curious what the age range is? My son is 8.
| smath wrote:
| Yes that's the one. I'd suggest sit through on of their
| parallel circles with your son- it's a free 45 min casual
| live only session, on Sundays. And the schedule is by age
| group - listed on their website
| pvg wrote:
| https://archive.is/hyF0u
| vundercind wrote:
| His annotated _Alice in Wonderland_ is really nice, too.
| wpollock wrote:
| I agree, although he missed one of the puns. In that day, even
| young children were taught latin. The speech with "O Mouse"
| comes from the lesson on conjugation which often used "am"
| (love): amo, amus, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. Having taken
| latin I recognized the joke. I always wished I could've written
| him about it.
| quesera wrote:
| The neglected Latin pedant in me can't not comment:
|
| 2nd person singular should be "amas". :)
| quuxplusone wrote:
| Cunningham's Law strikes again: sorry, but I doubt "O mouse"
| is a soundalike pun on "Amo, amas". Instead, the English (A
| mouse, of a mouse, to a mouse, a mouse, O mouse!) is simply
| the first five declensions in the traditional order:
| nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative. (Mus,
| muris, muri, murem, mus.) As seen for example in this Latin
| schoolbook from 1891:
|
| [1]
| https://archive.org/details/bellumhelvetiumf00lowe/page/203/
| zahlman wrote:
| For clarity: the article is written today, but Martin Gardner
| died in 2010.
| masfuerte wrote:
| > The question is, can you think of a single shape that looks
| like a triangle from one side, a circle from a second side and a
| square from the third side?
|
| He goes on to say that it resembles a household item. I can
| visualise the shape, but I can't think of anything that it looks
| like. Does anyone know what item it is?
|
| There's a picture here:
|
| https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1947363/is-there-a-...
| schoen wrote:
| It looks like lipstick to me. Or possibly the end of a
| screwdriver or chisel.
| parlortricks wrote:
| Looks like an interchangable end to a cake frosting spatula.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Was thinking an axehead
| retzkek wrote:
| Toothpaste tube!
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/El...
| herdyderdy wrote:
| Looks like a duckbill valve. My wife's breast pump uses them.
| thomaspark wrote:
| How bout the rubber tip of a mucilage glue bottle:
|
| https://deepfriedhoodsiecups.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/dfhc-7...
| zem wrote:
| screwdriver head. perelman's "mathematics can be fun" has that
| and another couple of fun examples
| https://archive.org/details/MathematicsCanBeFun-Eng-YakovPer...
|
| i got a copy of that book and gardner's "mathematical magic
| show" when i was 12 or so, and they both continue to entertain
| and delight me.
| whatshisface wrote:
| This one was my favorite:
|
| "A carpenter, working with a buzz saw, wishes to cut a wooden
| cube, three inches on a side, into 27 one-inch cubes. He can do
| this job easily by making six cuts through the cube, keeping the
| pieces together in the cube shape. Can he reduce the number of
| necessary cuts by rearranging the pieces after each cut? Either
| show how or prove that it's impossible."
|
| - Martin Gardener
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Lbh arrq fvk phgf orpnhfr lbh arrq gb rkcbfr rirel snpr bs gur
| prageny phor.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Someone downvoted this, but it's a rot13 version of the
| correct answer. (A very nice a answer, by the way.)
| quesera wrote:
| In case rot13 doesn't come naturally: alias
| rot13="tr 'A-Za-z' 'N-ZA-Mn-za-m'" echo "Lbh arrq fvk
| phgf orpnhfr lbh arrq gb rkcbfr rirel snpr bs gur prageny
| phor." | rot13
|
| I wish I had Mr Gardener's zero-kerf saw blades in my shop!
| yen223 wrote:
| Saying "Please decode this ..." to Claude worked
| perfectly.
|
| ChatGPT 4o mini kept getting one of the words wrong,
| funnily enough
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I'm surprised by this - wouldn't have expected there to
| be enough rot13 in the training data.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| rot13 was commonly used on forums and Usenet to avoid
| spoilers for a very long time. As forums got the
| equivalent of spoiler tags or folding or whatever to hide
| content that changed, and of course Usenet fell out of
| common use a while back.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| rot13.com also works, but this is better.
| phrenq wrote:
| As a woodworker, I wouldn't say those six cuts would be "easy",
| unless you weren't especially concerned about keeping all of
| your fingers!
| acomjean wrote:
| There is Gathering for Gardner non profit.
|
| for recreational math:
|
| https://www.gathering4gardner.org/
|
| They have conferences and talks and post on youtube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/G4GCelebration
| jmount wrote:
| Peter Winkler's Mathematical Puzzles is an amazing continuation
| with great teaching.
| musicale wrote:
| Perhaps nearly all magazines are in decline (RIP Popular Science,
| National Geographic etc.), but I still wish that whatever
| happened to Scientific American hadn't happened to it.
| glimshe wrote:
| There is nothing quite like it nowadays - not in print, not
| online. Quanta has a similar vibe, but it's Math-focused.
| lanstin wrote:
| It still exists and has articles. I see it in Mastodon links
| enough that I have subscribed. What happened to it?
| vonnik wrote:
| By a former SciAm columnist:
|
| https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/scientific-american-
| go...
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I don't think he actually ever shows _how_ SciAm has gone
| off the rails in that post, though. He just asserts that it
| has, and then does a lot of research showing that
| allegedly, everything is fine now, and then complains about
| an article that was rejected because of a specific example
| he wanted to use.
|
| It would be nice if he, instead, had more numbers about
| what types of articles Scientific American started running
| over the past decade, showing a move towards "going woke"
| as he puts it.
|
| As it is, it just sounds like he's mad that his article was
| rejected.
| lanstin wrote:
| Science is woke (global warming is real; LBGT is natural;
| the variance between groups is swamped by variance within
| groups whether that be racial or gender; coal is stupid;
| gun violence is mostly accidents and suicides; etc etc).
| One of the impressive things SciAm did this year is
| endorse the reality based candidate, VP Harris.
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