Irrationality of piIrrationality of piIrrationality of pi: the unpossible functionIrrationality of pi: derivatives of f In my previous post in this series, we defined the function and showed that . Today we’ll show the surprising fact that, for...

Math Teachers at Play #21 is up at Math Mama Writes…, and it includes this cute puzzle, which Sue apparently made up herself: The Numberland News runs personal ads. 21 was looking for a new friend and put an ad in. Two-digit, semi-prime, triangular,...

At Penn Alexander’s math club yesterday, the students worked on a fun puzzle that I’d never seen before. It goes like this: You have five bales of hay. For some reason, instead of being weighed individually, they were weighed in all possible...

I’ve written before about the mathematics of the traditional song “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. For a different angle, check out PNC Bank’s “Christmas Price Index”: apparently, every year they compute the total cost of all the gifts in the song as a...

Irrationality of piIrrationality of piIrrationality of pi: the unpossible functionIrrationality of pi: derivatives of f Recall from my last post what we are trying to accomplish: by assuming that is a rational number, we are going to define an...