All Stories by Ivars Peterson
- Math
Dogs Catching Frisbees
When navigating to intercept a thrown Frisbee, dogs appear to use the same geometric strategy that a baseball fielder employs to snag a fly ball hit into the outfield.
- Math
Dogs Catching Frisbees
When navigating to intercept a thrown Frisbee, dogs appear to use the same geometric strategy that a baseball fielder employs to snag a fly ball hit into the outfield.
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- Math
Groups, Graphs, and Erdös Numbers
Erdös numbers reveal the great extent of mathematical collaboration.
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- Math
Playing Pig, Optimally
The simple dice game Pig is surprisingly complex when you're trying to find an optimal strategy for playing it.
- Math
A Measure of Beauty
In the 1930s, mathematician G.D. Birkhoff proposed a formula for computing aesthetic value.
- Math
Extra Time, Math, and the SAT
Extra time on the math portion of the SAT helps the most able students the most.
- Math
Extra Time, Math, and the SAT
Extra time on the math portion of the SAT helps the most able students the most.
- Math
Counting on Fibonacci
Fibonacci numbers and their relationships can be visualized in terms of tilings.
- Math
Progressive Primes
Prime numbers have all sorts of remarkable and mysterious properties. Evenly divisible only by themselves and 1, primes can’t be written as the product of smaller positive integers. There are infinitely many of them, and they appear to be scattered somewhat haphazardly among the whole numbers. It’s not yet known if there are infinitely many […]
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