Series:

Dolciani Mathematical Expositions

2 total works

Cover of Which Way Did the Bicycle Go?
This book contains the best problems selected from over 25 years of the Problem of the Week at Macalester College. This collection will give students, 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. The collection 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 45-degree wedges meeting at a point other than the center of the pizza, and two people eat alternating wedges, will they get equal amounts of pizza? Or: Is an advertiser's claim that a certain unusual combination lock allows thousands of combinations justified? Complete solutions to the 191 problems are included with problem variations and topics for investigation.

Cover of Old and New Unsolved Problems in Plane Geometry and Number Theory
Victor Klee and Stan Wagon discuss some of the unsolved problems in number theory and geometry, many of which can be understood by readers with a very modest mathematical background. The presentation is organized around 24 central problems, many of which are accompanied by other, related problems. The authors place each problem in its historical and mathematical context, and the discussion is at the level of undergraduate mathematics. Each problem section is presented in two parts. The first gives an elementary overview discussing the history and both the solved and unsolved variants of the problem. The second part contains more details, including a few proofs of related results, a wider and deeper survey of what is known about the problem and its relatives, and a large collection of references. Both parts contain exercises, with solutions. The book is aimed at both teachers and students of mathematics who want to know more about famous unsolved problems.