Related papers: Conway's Wizards
This article presents a new development of magic squares with a simple set up.
We introduce and study a new kind of congruent number problem on the right trapezoid.
Puzzles are a versatile combinatorial tool to interpret the Littlewood-Richardson coefficients for Grassmannians. In this paper, we propose the concept of puzzle ideals whose varieties one-one correspond to the tilings of puzzles and…
Notes on the Spinpossible puzzle game. We give a mathematical description of the game, prove some elementary bounds on the length of optimal solutions, and consider variations of the game which place restrictions on the set of permitted…
"Eye-Witless", "Haisu" and "Oriental House" are genres of logic puzzles invented by William Hu, and "Detour" is a genre of logic puzzle invented by online user Guowen Zhang. Each of these puzzles revolves around constructing a path or loop…
The Kruskal Count is a card trick invented by Martin J. Kruskal in which a magician "guesses" a card selected by a subject according to a certain counting procedure. With high probability the magician can correctly "guess" the card. The…
A puzzle about prisoners trying to identify the color of a hat on their head leads to a version where there are k more hats than prisoners. This generalized puzzle is related to the independence number of the arrangement graph A(m, n) and…
In 1997, John Conway constructed a $6$-fold transitive subset $M_{13}$ of permutations on a set of size $13$ for which the subset fixing any given point was isomorphic to the Mathieu group $M_{12}$. The construction was via a…
The Willmore conjecture, proposed in 1965, concerns the quest to find the best torus of all. This problem has inspired a lot of mathematics over the years, helping bringing together ideas from subjects like conformal geometry, partial…
We give a new geometric proof of a conjecture of Fulton on the Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. This conjecture was firstly proved by Knutson, Tao and Woodward using the Honeycomb theory. A geometric proof was given by Belkale. Our proof…
This paper explores special conditions on the starting value of a Collatz sequence which imply that the Collatz conjecture is true. This is the result of the collaboration of a retired mathematics professor (Koelzer) and a retired physics…
A conjecture regarding the structure of expander graphs is discussed.
An expository introduction to bidding chess and other bidding games. To appear in Mathematical Intelligencer.
We prove new results, related to the Littlewood and Mixed Littlewood conjectures in Diophantine approximation.
The present paper show that Conway-Coxeter friezes of zigzag type are characterized by (unoriented) rational links. As an application of this characterization Jones polynomial can be defined for Conway-Coxeter friezes of zigzag type. This…
By creating a new method, the author proved the well-known world's baffling problems Goldbach conjecture, twin primes conjecture, the Proposition (C) and the Proposition $n^2+1$.
The prisoners and hats puzzle, or simply the hat puzzle, is a family of games in which a group of prisoners are each assigned a colored hat and are asked to guess the color of their own hat. Various versions of the puzzle arise depending on…
We illustrate how one can use basic combinatorial theory and computer programming technique (Python) to analyze the combinatorial game: Mahjong. The results confirm some folklore concerning the game, and expose some unexpected results.…
Recently Z.W.Sun found over hundred conjectured formulas for 1/pi. Many of them were proved by H.H.Chan, J.Wan andW.Zudilin (see [3], [8] in the paper). Here we show that several other formulas in [6] are simple transformations of known…
Recollections by the author about how his interactions with John Wheeler influenced his career in physics.