Barrycades and Septoku: Papers in Honor of Martin Gardner and Tom Rodgers

ISBN-13: 9781470448707

Thane Plambeck;Tomas Rokicki

Opis

The Gathering 4 Gardner is a biannual conference founded--and for many years organized--by Tom Rodgers to celebrate the spirit of Martin Gardner. While primarily concerned with recreational mathematics, most of Gardner's intellectual interests are featured, including magic, literature, philosophy, puzzles, art, and rationality. Gardner's writing inspired several generations of mathematicians by introducing us to the joy of discovery and exploration, and the Gathering's aim is to continue that tradition of inspiration. This volume, a tribute to Rodgers and Gardner, consists of papers originally presented at the Gathering 4 Gardner meetings. Recreational mathematics is strongly prominent with contributions from Neil Sloane, Richard Guy, Solomon Golomb, Barry Cipra, Erik Demaine, and many others. There are games and puzzles, including new Nim-like games, chess puzzles, coin weighings, coin flippings, and contributions that combine art and puzzles or magic and puzzles. Two historical articles present the stories of combinatorial game theory and the search for God's number for Rubik's Cube. Anyone who finds pleasure in clever and intriguing intellectual puzzles will find much to enjoy in Barrycades and Septoku.

Spis treści

• Sequences, tiling, and packing: N. J. A. Sloane, Eight hateful sequences
• R. K. Guy, Building barrycades and constructing corrals
• S. W. Golomb, Limited placements of polyominoes on rectangles
• H. H.-H. Yu, Polyominoes on a multicolored infinite grid
• Fun and games: C. P. dos Santos, A chess tribute to John Horton Conway
• A. N. Siegel, Some new combinatorial games
• B. Cipra, Factor subtractor
• G. I. Bell, The mathematics of Septoku
• History: T. Rokicki, Thirty years of computer cubing: The search for God's number
• L. Rougetet, Nim-like games: An ancestry
• Puzzles: B. Chen, Y. H. Fu, A. Liu, G. Sicherman, H. Taylor, and P.-S. Wu, Triangles of absolute differences
• M. L. Fredman, D. A. Kleitman, and P. Winkler, Generalization of a puzzle involving set partitions
• Y. Elran, A generalization of Retrolife
• T. Khovanova and K. Knop, Coins of three different weights
• G. Hart, Rubber bandzzles: Three mathematical puzzle-art challenges
• Art, sculpture, and design: G. Hart, Comet!
• M. O. van Deventer and I. Kriz, Developing Topsy Turvy and Number Planet
• Magic and miscellany: N. Benbernou, E. D. Demaine, M. L. Demaine, and B. Rossman, Coin-flipping magic
• E. D. Demaine, M. L. Demaine, B. Palop, and J. Ku, Three puzzle fonts.