Discrete Ideas

What?! Another birthday so soon!? No, you haven’t lost 6 months of your life, and The Count isn’t 41… yet! Due to the overwhelming popularity of my Birthday article, it became clear to me that even those people that weren’t born during the awesome year of 1969 would like to be able [...]

Have you ever had a problem stuck in your head, and you couldn’t find the answer? I was recently reminded of a problem I first came up with while doing a statistics workbook the summer of my 3rd grade year (yes, my math-teacher mother gave us workbooks to do during summer break… hey, it [...]

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I’m a football fan… well, more specifically the NFL. I hear that colleges other than the one I went to actually have their own teams and that quite a lot of people think that the outcomes of these “college football games” are important, but I never saw the appeal. [...]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – I like math. Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t run around solving Fermat’s Last Theorem for fun on Sunday nights, or anything like that. Perhaps it would be more clear to say I enjoy math, for many reasons, not the least of [...]

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About two years ago, I got interested in Geocaching1. I call it “organized littering”. Essentially, people have taken the time to hide caches (usually tupperware containers full of bric-a-brac) all over the world. They then log the lat/long coordinates of their stash, and enter them along with [...]

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A lot of math is broken down into processes. Start with a problem, do this, do that and, voila, you have the answer. Most people in America learn the same processes for doing most basic arithmetic, and it’s easy to forget there might be other ways to solve these [...]