Which Way Did the Bicycle Go?: And Other Intriguing Mathematical Mysteries

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· Dolciani Mathematical Expositions Book 18 · American Mathematical Soc.
Ebook
235
Pages

About this ebook

This collection will give students (high school or beyond), teachers, and university professors a chance to experience the pleasure of wrestling with some beautiful problems of elementary mathematics. Readers can compare their sleuthing talents with those of Sherlock Holmes, who made a bad mistake regarding the first problem in the collection: Determine the direction of travel of a bicycle that has left its tracks in a patch of mud. Which Way did the Bicycle Go? contains a variety of other unusual and interesting problems in geometry, algebra, combinatorics, and number theory. For example, if a pizza is sliced into eight 45degree wedges meeting at a point other than the center of the pizza, and two people eat alternate wedges, will they get equal amounts of pizza? Or: What is the rightmost nonzero digit of the product $1cdot 2cdot 3cdots 1,000,000$? Or: Is a manufacturer's claim that a certain unusual combination lock allows thousands of combinations justified? Complete solutions to the 191 problems are included along with problem variations and topics for investigation.

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