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 got results). The book dealt with dice and the probabilities of a 1 showing on a 6-sider, or the sum of 2 rolled dice being 7, etc. but my question had a twist I couldn’t quite solve. Now it’s easy to see that the probability of rolling a 1 on a 6-sided die is 1 in 6, but what probability exists, in rolling 2 dice, of seeing at least one 1 (on either die, or both)?
Continue reading A Hard Lesson Learned
|
||||||
   |
|
|||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Discrete Ideas - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
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. Anyway, as I said, I follow the NFL. This year, as the season has proceeded, I’ve found myself noticing quite a few long winning and losing streaks occuring this year. With 2 teams reaching 10-0, and a few teams having streaks of 6 and 7 wins (or losses), I decided to track the actual numbers and determine just how abnormal this season is.
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 which is, when you prove something in math, it’s true every time!
About two years ago, I got interested in Geocaching
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 problems. The positional decimal system developed by the Indians (of India) is the standard taught in every school I’ve ever been in, but it’s not the only way to multiply two numbers
Someone over at Stetson University