Related papers: Studies in Tours of Knight on Rectangular Boards
Conway Checkers is a game played with a checker placed in each square of the lower half of an infinite checkerboard. Pieces move by jumping over an adjacent checker, removing the checker jumped over. Conway showed that it is not possible to…
In this short note we have produced different kind of magic squares using digital letter having only the algorisms: 0, 1, 2, 5, and 8. The interesting fact in considering these five digits is that the day 8th May 2010 also have these ones…
How many shuffles are needed to mix up a deck of cards? This question may be answered in the language of a random walk on the symmetric group, $S_{52}$. This generalises neatly to the study of random walks on finite groups, themselves a…
In our recent paper, we studied periodic billiard trajectories in the regular pentagon and closed geodesic on the double pentagon, a translation surface of genus two. In particular, we made a number of conjectures concerning symbolic…
We study the motion of skateboard flip tricks by modeling them as continuous curves in the group $SO(3)$ of special orthogonal matrices. We show that up to continuous deformation there are only four flip tricks. The proof relies on an…
In the chapter "Magic with a Matrix" in \emph{Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions} (1988), Martin Gardner describes a delightful "party trick" to fill the squares of a $d$-by-$d$ chessboard with nonnegative integers such that…
There are n people, each of whom is either a knight or a spy. It is known that at least k knights are present, where n/2 < k < n. Knights always tell the truth. We consider both spies who always lie and spies who answer as they see fit.…
This short note reports a master theorem on tight asymptotic solutions to divide-and-conquer recurrences with more than one recursive term: for example, T(n) = 1/4 T(n/16) + 1/3 T(3n/5) + 4 T(n/100) + 10 T(n/300) + n^2.
We indulge in what mathematicians call frivolous activities. In Arithmetic Billiards, a ball is bouncing around in a rectangle. In Parity Checkers we place checkers on a checkerboard under certain parity constraints. Both activities turn…
General methods for the construction of magic squares of any order have been searched for centuries. There have been several standard strategies for this purpose, such as the knight movement, or the construction of bordered magic squares,…
Following a recent paper by Baryshnikov and Zharnitskii, we consider outer billiards in the plane possessing invariant curves consisting of periodic orbits. We prove the existence and abundance of such tables using tools from sub-Riemannian…
After a sequence of improvements Boyd, Sitters, van der Ster, and Stougie proved that any 2-connected graph whose n vertices have degree 3, i.e., a cubic 2-connected graph, has a Hamiltonian tour of length at most (4/3)n, establishing in…
It is unknown at present whether a magic square of squared integers exists. Such an object is defined to be a 3 by 3 grid of 9 distinct integer squares, such that the entries of each row, column, and two main diagonals sum to the same…
It is shown that the set of 4-period orbits in outer billiard with piecewise smooth convex boundary has an empty interior, provided that no four corners of the boundary form a parallelogram.
In this paper, we present the problem of counting magic squares and we focus on the case of multiplicative magic squares of order 4. We give the exact number of normal multiplicative magic squares of order 4 with an original and complete…
We study optimal configurations of Queens on a square chessboard, defined as those covering the maximum number of squares. For a fixed number of Queens, $q$, we prove the existence of two thresholds in board size: a non-attacking threshold…
The varietal hypercube $VQ_n$ is a variant of the hypercube $Q_n$ and has better properties than $Q_n$ with the same number of edges and vertices. This paper shows that every edge of $VQ_n$ is contained in cycles of every length from 4 to…
We investigate the rotation sets of billiards on the $m$-dimensional torus with one small convex obstacle and in the square with one small convex obstacle. In the first case the displacement function, whose averages we consider, measures…
We confirm the following conjecture of Fekete and Woeginger from 1997: for any sufficiently large even number $n$, every set of $n$ points in the plane can be connected by a spanning tour (Hamiltonian cycle) consisting of straight-line…
We investigate the game of peg solitaire on different board shapes, and find those of diamond or rhombus shape have interesting properties. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. Rhombus boards of side 6 have…