Tag Archives: infinity

Talk Like a Computer, Infinite Hotel, and Video Contest

01010111 01100101 01101100 01100011 01101111 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110111 01100101 01100101 01101011 00100111 01110011 00100000 01001101 01100001 01110100 01101000 00100000 01001101 01110101 01101110 01100011 01101000 00100001

Or, if you don’t speak binary, welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Looking at that really, really long string of 0s and 1s, you might think that binary is a really inefficient way to encode letters, numbers, and symbols. I mean, the single line of text, “Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!” turns into six lines of digits that make you dizzy to look at. But, suppose you were a computer. You wouldn’t be able to talk, listen, or write. But you would be made up of lots of little electric signals that can be either on or off. To communicate, you’d want to use the power of being able to turn signals on and off. So, the best way to communicate would be to use a code that associated patterns of on and off signals with important pieces of information– like letters, numbers, and other symbols.

That’s how binary works to encode information. Computer scientists have developed a code called ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, that matches important symbols and typing communication commands (like tab and backspace) with numbers.

To use in computing, those numbers are converted into binary. How do you do that? Well, as you probably already know, the numbers we regularly use are written using place-value in base 10. That means that each digit in a number has a different value based on its spot in the number, and the places get 10 times larger as you move to the left in the number. In binary, however, the places have different values. Instead of growing 10 times larger, each place in a binary number is twice as large as the one to its right. The only digits you can use in binary are 0 and 1– which correspond to turning a signal on or leaving it off.

But if you want to write in binary, you don’t have to do all the conversions yourself. Just use this handy translator, and you’ll be writing in binary 01101001 01101110 00100000 01101110 01101111 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00101110

Next up, check out this video about a classic number problem: the Infinite Hotel Paradox. If you find infinity baffling, as many mathematicians do, this video may help you understand it a little better. (Or add to the bafflingness– which is just how infinity works, I guess.)

I especially like how despite how many more people get rooms at the hotel (so long as the number of people is countable!), the hotel manager doesn’t make more money…

Speaking of videos, how about a math video contest? MATHCOUNTS is hosting a video contest for 6th-8th grade students. To participate, teams of four students and their teacher coach choose a problem from the MATHCOUNTS School Handbook and write a screenplay based on that problem. Then, make a video and post it to the contest website. The winning video is selected by a combination of students and adult judges– and each member of the winning team receives a college scholarship!

Here’s last year’s first place video.

01000010 01101111 01101110 00100000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01100101 01110100 01101001 01110100 00100001 (That means, Bon appetit!)

Posted by Anna Weltman. Categories: Math Munch. Tags: binary, code, contest, distance formula, Hilbert, infinity, Mathcounts, place value, video. 26 Comments

Jan. ’14

Light Bulbs, Lanterns, and Lights Out

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Edison with his light bulb.

On this day in 1880, Thomas Edison was given a patent for his most famous bright idea—the light bulb.

Edison once said, “Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration”—a good reminder that putting in some work is important both in math and in life. He also said, “We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.” A humbling thought. Also, based on that quote, it sounds like Edison might have had a use for permilles or even permyraids in addition to percents!

Mike’s octahedron-in-a-light-buld.

In celebration of this illustrious anniversary, I’d like to share some light mathematical fare relating to, well, light bulbs. For starters, J. Mike Rollins of North Carolina has created each of the Platonic solids inside of light bulbs, ship-in-a-bottle style. Getting just the cube to work took him the better part of twelve hours! Talk about perspiration. Mike has also made a number of lovely Escher-inspired woodcuts. Check ’em out!

Evelyn’s Schwartz lantern.

Next up is a far-out example from calculus that’s also a good idea for an art project. It’s called the Schwartz lantern. I found out about this amazing object last fall when Evelyn Lamb tweeted and blogged about it.

The big idea of calculus is that we can find exact answers to tough problems by setting up a pattern of approximations that get better and better and then—zoop! take the process to its logical conclusion at infinity. But there’s a catch: you have to be careful about how you set up your pattern!

A “nicely” triangulated cylinder.

For example, if you take a cylinder and approximate its surface with a bunch of triangles carefully, you’ll end up with a surface that matches the cylinder in shape and size. But if you go about the process in a different way, you can end up with a surface that stays right near the cylinder but that has infinite area. That’s the Schwartz lantern, first proposed by Karl Hermann Amandus Schwarz of Cauchy-Schwartz fame. The infinite area happens because of all the crinkles that this devilish pattern creates. For some delightful technical details about the lantern’s construction, check out Evelyn’s post and this article by Conan Wu.

Maybe you’ll try folding a Schwartz lantern of your own. There’s a template and instructions on Conan’s blog to get you started. You’ll be glowing when you finish it up—especially if you submit a photo of it to our Readers’ Gallery. Even better, how about a video? You could make the internet’s first Schwartz lantern short film!

Robert Torrence and his Lights Out puzzle.

Robert and his Lights Out puzzle.

At the MOVES Conference last fall, Bruce Torrence of Randolf-Macon College gave a talk about the math of Lights Out. Lights Out is a puzzle—a close relative of Ray Ray—that’s played on a square grid. When you push one of the buttons in the grid it switches on or off, and its neighbors do, too. Bruce and his son Robert created an extension of this puzzle to some non-grid graphs. Here’s an article about their work and here’s an applet on the New York Times website where you can play Lights Out on the Peterson graph, among others. You can even create a Lights Out puzzle of your own! If it’s more your style, you can try a version of the original game called All Out on Miniclip.

The original Lights Out handheld game from 1995.

There’s a huge collection of Lights Out resources on Jaap’s Puzzle Page (previously), including solution strategies, variations, and some great counting problems. Lights Out and Ray Ray are both examples of what’s called a “sigma-plus game” in the mathematical literature. Just as a bonus, there’s this totally other game called Light Up. I haven’t solved a single puzzle yet, but my limitations shouldn’t stop you from trying. Perspiration!

All this great math work might make you hungry, so…bon appetit!

Posted by Justin Lanier. Categories: Math Munch. Tags: applet, art, building, calculus, combinatorics, escher, games, geometry, history, infinity, interactive puzzle, origami, percentages, polyhedra, puzzles, quotes, recreational mathematics, surfaces, tessellation. 2 Comments

Oct. ’13

God’s Number, Chocolate, and Devil’s Number

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch! This week, I’m sharing with you some math things that make me go, “What?!” Maybe you’ll find them surprising, too.

The first time I heard about this I didn’t believe it. If you’ve never heard it, you probably won’t believe it either.

Ever tried to solve one of these? I’ve only solved a Rubik’s cube once or twice, always with lots of help – but every time I’ve worked on one, it’s taken FOREVER to make any progress. Lots of time, lots of moves…. There are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (yes, that’s 43 quintillion) different configurations of a Rubik’s cube, so solving a cube from any one of these states must take a ridiculous number of moves. Right?

Nope. In 2010, some mathematicians and computer scientists proved that every single Rubik’s cube – no matter how it’s mixed up – can be solved in at most 20 moves. Because only an all-knowing being could figure out how to solve any Rubik’s cube in 20 moves or less, the mathematicians called this number God’s Number.

Once you get over the disbelief that any of the 43 quintillion cube configurations can be solved in less than 20 moves, you may start to wonder how someone proved that. Maybe the mathematicians found a really clever way that didn’t involve solving every cube?

Not really – they just used a REALLY POWERFUL computer. Check out this great video from Numberphile about God’s number to learn more:

Here’s a chart that shows how many Rubik’s cube configurations need different numbers of moves to solve. I think it’s surprising that so few required all 20 moves. Even though every cube can be solved in 20 or less moves, this is very hard to do. I think it’s interesting how in the video, one of the people interviewed points out that solving a cube in very few moves is probably much more impressive than solving a cube in very little time. Just think – it takes so much thought to figure out how to solve a Rubik’s cube at all. If you also tried to solve it efficiently… that would really be a puzzle.

Next, check out this cool video. Its appealing title is, “How to create chocolate out of nothing.”

This type of puzzle, where area seems to magically appear or disappear when it shouldn’t, is called a geometric vanish. We’ve been talking about these a lot at school, and one of the things we’re wondering is whether you can do what the guy in the video did again, to make a second magical square of chocolate. What do you think?

Finally, I’ve always found infinity baffling. It’s so hard to think about. Here’s a particularly baffling question: which is bigger, infinity or infinity plus one? Is there something bigger than infinity?

I found this great story that helps me think about different sizes of infinity. It’s based on similar story by mathematician Raymond Smullyan. In the story, you are trapped by the devil until you guess the devil’s number. The story tells you how to guarantee that you’ll guess the devil’s number depending on what sets of numbers the devil chooses from.

Surprisingly, you’ll be able to guess the devil’s number even if he picks from a set of numbers with an infinite number of numbers in it! You’ll guess his number if he picked from the counting numbers larger than zero, positive or negative counting numbers, or all fractions and counting numbers. You’d think that there would be too many fractions for you to guess the devil’s number if he included those in his set. There are infinitely many counting numbers – but aren’t there even more fractions? The story tells you about a great way to organize your guessing that works even with fractions. (And shows that the set of numbers with fractions AND counting numbers is the same size as the set of numbers with just counting numbers… Whoa.)

Is there something mathematical that makes you go, “What?!” How about, “HUH?!” If so, send us an email or leave us a note in the comments. We’d love to hear about it!

Bon appetit!

Posted by Anna Weltman. Categories: Math Munch. Tags: big numbers, geometry, infinity, numbers, paradox, puzzles, story, video. 94 Comments