Related papers: Monty Hall problem revisited once more
We investigate a coin-weighing puzzle that appeared in the all-Russian math Olympiad in 2000. We liked the puzzle because the methods of analysis differ from classical coin-weighing puzzles. We generalize the puzzle by varying the number of…
The possible existence of a complex structure on the 6-sphere has been a famous unsolved problem for over 60 years. In that time many "solutions" have been put forward, in both directions. Mistakes have always been found. In this paper I…
There is a rich history of domino tilings in two dimensions. Through a variety of techniques we can answer questions such as: how many tilings are there of a given region or what does the space of all tilings look like? These questions and…
Cosmology today is confronted with several seemingly insoluble puzzles and strange, inexplicable coincidences. But a careful re-examination of the Cosmological principle and the Weyl postulate, foundational elements in this subject,…
A simple mechanical problem is considered which we believe will help students to familiarize some concepts of mechanics of variable mass systems. Meanwhile they can even learn some thrilling physics of bungee jumping.
In this article, we discuss some classical problems in combinatorics which can be solved by exploiting analogues between graph theory and the theory of manifolds. One well-known example is the McMullen conjecture, which was settled twenty…
This paper proves that push-pull block puzzles in 3D are PSPACE-complete to solve, and push-pull block puzzles in 2D with thin walls are NP-hard to solve, settling an open question by Zubaran and Ritt. Push-pull block puzzles are a type of…
In this short note we recall the definition of intrinsically harmonic forms, some known results and some open problems.
In this paper we study the long-standing open question regarding the computational complexity of one of the core problems in supply chains management, the periodic joint replenishment problem. This problem has received a lot of attention…
Supersymmetry has been studied for over three decades by physicists, its superset even longer by mathematicians, and superspace has proven to be very useful both conceptually and in facilitating computations. However, the (1) necessary…
Machine learning (ML) in its current form implies that an answer to any problem can be well approximated by a function of a very peculiar form: a specially adjusted iteration of Heavyside theta-functions. It is natural to ask if the answers…
After a brief reminscence about work with K. Sato 25 years ago on the monopole problem and inflation, a discussion is given of the black hole information paradox. It is argued that, quite generally, it should be anticipated that the states…
We show two results of mean value problem, Smale's mean value problem is comprehensively solved in this paper.
We provide an overview of some recent progress on the complexity of election systems. The issues studied include the complexity of the winner, manipulation, bribery, and control problems.
An attempt is made in order to clarify the so called regular black holes issue. It is revisited that if one works within General Relativity minimally coupled with non linear source, mainly of electromagnetic origin, and within a static…
The apparently trifling unexpected hanging paradox has generated an enormous philosophical literature. We introduce the mathematician to this literature, paying special attention to aspects that involve nontrivial mathematics. This xxx…
This paper presents a little reflection about the Sleeping Beauty Problem, maybe contributing to shed light on it and perhaps helping to find a simple and elegant solution that could definitively resolve the controversies about it.
The score sequence of a tournament is the sequence of the out-degrees of its vertices arranged in nondecreasing order. The problem of counting score sequences of a tournament with $n$ vertices is more than 100 years old (MacMahon 1920). In…
The purpose of this note is to raise two different questions, which are rarely if ever considered, and to which, it seems, we lack convincing, systematic answers. These questions can be posed as: - Why do we compute? - What do we compute?…
We address the question of the uniqueness of the Schwarzschild black hole by considering the following question: How many meaningful solutions of the Einstein equations exist that agree with the Schwarzschild solution (with a fixed mass m)…