You're reading: Posts Tagged: combinatorics

Mobile Numbers: Truchet Tiling

In this series of posts, Katie investigates simple mathematical concepts using the Google Sheets spreadsheet app on her phone. If you have a simple maths trick, pattern or concept you’d like to see illustrated in this series, please get in touch.

Since apparently I’m now a maven for interesting fun things built using Google Sheets, someone tagged me in to suggest I might like to see this Truchet Tiling Generator, built in Google Sheets using images generated in Google Drawing.

Mathematical Objects: Dobble

Mathematical Objects

A conversation about mathematics inspired by cards from the game Dobble. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett. You can read more about Katie’s adventures in golfing combinatorics.

Dobble
Play

Mathematical Objects: Lottery machine

Mathematical Objects

A conversation about mathematics inspired by a lottery machine. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett.

lottery machine
Play

Mathematical Objects: Robot caterpillar

Mathematical Objects

A conversation about combinatorics, the mathematics of counting, inspired by a robot caterpillar. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett.

Robot caterpillar

Play

The smallest unique Cheshire Cat

A red Cheshire cat wearing a blue hat

At the MathsJam annual gathering, one of the many activities attendees can participate in is a competition competition – entrants each come up with a competition and submit it into a larger competition, other attendees enter each of the competitions within the competition competition, and the organisers get the chance to make long and confusing (but strictly correct) announcements that contain the word competition a lot of times.

This year, we decided, after a spectacular last-minute MathsJam bake-off entry failure on the behalf of Katie, to enter a joint competition into the competition competition. Inspired by the ‘lowest unique answer’ style of competition, which has previously featured in various MathsJam Competition Competitions (and our recent lecture on game theory) we came up with an idea – what about a competition seeking a unique entry in a non-ordered set?

Pringle stack mathematics

Pringles being stacked

Pringles ran a Super Bowl advert. In case you’re looking for ways to give Pringles more money, apparently you can buy several tubes of Pringles and mix the flavours. (Pringles are a type of food. Super Bowl is a kind of sport. None of that matters, what matters is…) The advert shows a man stacking three Pringles together and claims there are 318,000 possibilities.

Google+