Related papers: Things to do with a broken stick
There is well-known problem of geometric probability which can be quote as the Broken Spaghetti Problem. It addresses the following question: A stick of spaghetti breaks into three parts and all points of the stick have the same probability…
The broken stick problem is the following classical question. You have a segment $[0,1]$. You choose two points on this segment at random. They divide the segment into three smaller segments. Show that the probability that the three…
Break a stick at random at $n-1$ points to obtain $n$ pieces. We give an explicit formula for the probability that every choice of $k$ segments from this broken stick can form a $k$-gon, generalizing similar work. The method we use can be…
We present a variation of the broken stick problem in which $n$ stick lengths are sampled uniformly at random. We prove that the probability that no three sticks can form a triangle is the reciprocal of the product of the first $n$…
If a line cuts randomly two sides of a triangle, the length of the segment determined by the points of intersection is also random. The object of this study, applied to a particular case, is to calculate the probability that the length of…
The title of the article is identical to the title of Chapter 21 in Gardner (2001): because we are going to analyze the probability calculations and the ambiguity of the problem statements. We will analyze 3 out of 4 problems from Gardner…
We suggest a method of solving the problem of existence of a triangle with prescribed two bisectors and one third element which can be taken as one of the angles, the sides, the heights or the medians, or the third bisector.
In this paper, we derive the exact formula for the probability that three randomly and uniformly selected points from the interior of the unit cube form vertices of an obtuse triangle.
Regard the closed interval $[0,1]$ as a stick. Partition $[0,1]$ into $n+1$ different intervals $I_1, \ \dots \ , I_{n+1},$ where $n \geq 2,$ which represent smaller sticks. The classical Broken Stick problem asks to find the probability…
Breaking a line segment L in two places at random, the three pieces can be configured as a triangle T with probability 1/4. We determine both the PDF and CDF for area(T) in terms of elliptic integrals. In particular, if L has length 1, then…
We generalize the well-known broken stick problem in several ways, including a discrete "brick" analogue and a sequential "pick-up sticks/bricks" version. The limit behavior of the broken brick problem gives a combinatorial proof of the…
Let a stick be broken at random at n-1 points to form n pieces. We consider three problems on forming k-gons with k out of these n pieces, and show how a statistical approach, through a linear transformation of variables, yields simple…
We propose a discrete approach to solve problems on forming polygons from broken sticks, which is akin to counting polygons with sides of integer length subject to certain Diophantine inequalities. Namely, we use MacMahon's Partition…
We consider the problem of optimizing the product of the distances from a given point in a triangle to each vertex. There are two possible cases in general. For isosceles triangles, we explicitly show exactly when both cases occur.
In the first part of this paper, we obtain symmetric formulae for the probabilities that a plane convex body hits exactly 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 triangles of a lattice of congruent triangles in the plane. Furthermore, a very simple formula for…
In this paper we first study the isoperimetric problem in the case of integer triangles, as well as Alcuin's sequence and how it relates to the number of different integer triangles with a given perimeter. We then present and compare two…
Given a triangle ABC, we derive the probability distribution function and the moments of the area of an inscribed triangle RST whose vertices are uniformly distributed on AB, BC, and CA. The theoretical results are confirmed by a Monte…
H. Steinhaus asked a question whether inside each acute triangle there is a point from which perpendiculars to the sides divide the triangle into three parts with equal areas. We present two methods of solving Steinhaus' problem.
In this article we provide several exact formulae to calculate the probability that a random triangle chosen within a planar region (any Lebesgue measurable set of finite measure) contains a given fixed point $O$. These formulae are in…
If we label the vertices of a triangle with 1, 2 and 4, and the orthocentre with 7, then any of the four numbers 1, 2, 4, 7 is the nim-sum of the other three and is their orthocentre. Regard the triangle as an orthocentric quadrangle.…