Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

April is Mathematics Awareness Month. So happy Mathematics Awareness Month! This year’s theme is “Mathematics, Magic, and Mystery”. It’s inspired by the fact that 2014 would have marked Martin Gardner’s 100th birthday.

A few of the mathy morsels that await you this month on mathaware.org!

Each day this month a new piece of magical or mysterious math will be revealed on the MAM site. The mathematical offering for today is a card trick that’s based on the Fibonacci numbers. Dipping into this site from time to time would be a great way for you to have a mathy month.

It is white’s turn to move. Who will win this Hexapawn game?

Speaking of Martin Gardner, I recently ran across a version of Hexapawn made in the programming language Scratch. Hexapawn is a chess mini-game involving—you guessed it—six pawns. Martin invented it and shared it in his Mathematical Games column in 1962. (Here’s the original column.) The object of the game is to get one of your pawns to the other side of the board or to “lock” the position so that your opponent cannot move. The pawns can move by stepping forward one square or capturing diagonally forward. Simple rules, but winning is trickier than you might think!

The program I found was created by a new Scratcher who goes by the handle “puttering”. On the site he explains:

I’m a dad. I was looking for a good way for my daughters to learn programming and I found Scratch. It turns out to be so much fun that I’ve made some projects myself, when I can get the computer…

puttering’s Scratch version of Conway’s Game of Life

Something that’s super cool about puttering’s Hexapawn game is that the program learns from its stratetgy errors and gradually becomes a stronger player as you play more! It’s well worth playing a bunch of games just to see this happen. puttering has other Scratch creations on his page, too—like a solver for the Eight Queens puzzle and a Secret Code Machine. Be sure to check those out, too!

Last up, our friend Nalini Joshi recently travelled to a meeting of the Australian Academy of Science, which led to a little number puzzle.

What unusual ways of describing a number! Trying to learn about these terms led me to an equally unusual calculator, hosted on the Math Celebrity website. The calculator will show you calculations about the factors of a numbers, as well as lots of categories that your number fits into. Derek Orr of Math Year-Round and I figured out that Nalini’s clues fit with multiple numbers, including 185, 191, and 205. So we needed more clues!

Can you find another number that fits Nalini’s clues? What do you think would be some good additional questions we could ask Nalini? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

A result from the Number Property Calculator

I hope this post helps you to kick off a great Mathematics Awareness Month. Bon appetit!