Related papers: A Simple Multiple Integral Solution to the Broken …
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…
An m-ballot path of size n is a path on the square grid consisting of north and east steps, starting at (0,0), ending at (mn,n), and never going below the line {x=my}. The set of these paths can be equipped with a lattice structure, called…
We introduce the straggler identification problem, in which an algorithm must determine the identities of the remaining members of a set after it has had a large number of insertion and deletion operations performed on it, and now has…
A new representation of the exact time dependent solution of the discrete master equation is derived. This representation can be considered as contraction of the path integral solution of Haken. It allows the calculation of the probability…
We illustrate how to invite and excite students about research by exploring higher-dimensional generalizations of the classical egg drop problem, in which the goal is to locate a critical breaking point using the fewest number of trials.…
An original approach to solving rather difficult probabilistic problems arising in studying the readout of random discrete fields and having no exact analytical solutions at the moment is proposed. Several algorithms for direct, iterative,…
A symmetric characteristic singular integral equation with two fixed singularities at the endpoints in the class of functions bounded at the ends is analyzed. It reduces to a vector Hilbert problem for a half-disc and then to a vector…
We introduce the notion of slice depth of a 2-knot K, which is the minimal integer n such that K is n-slice. We give an upper bound for the slice depth of the n-twist spin of a classical knot which belongs to several specific classes,…
We introduce a computational origami problem which we call the segment folding problem: given a set of $n$ line-segments in the plane the aim is to make creases along all segments in the minimum number of folding steps. Note that a folding…
A partition of a positive integer $n$ is a representation of $n$ as a sum of a finite number of positive integers (called parts). A trapezoidal number is a positive integer that has a partition whose parts are a decreasing sequence of…
The Stirling number of the second kind $n\brace k$ counts the number of ways to partition a set of $n$ labeled balls into $k$ non-empty unlabeled cells. As an extension of this, we consider $b_1+b_2+\ldots+b_n$ balls with $b_1$ balls…
Inspired by the basic stick fragmentation model proposed by Becker et al. in arXiv:1309.5603v4, we consider three new versions of such fragmentation models, namely, continuous with random number of parts, continuous with probabilistic…
The Sequential Multiple Knapsack Problem is a special case of Multiple knapsack problem in which the items sizes are divisible. A characterization of the optimal solutions of the problem and a description of the convex hull of all the…
This work is about a partition problem which is an instance of the distance magic graph labeling problem. Given positive integers $n,k$ and $p_1\le p_2\le \cdots\le p_k$ such that $p_1+\cdots+p_k=n$ and $k$ divides $\sum_{i=1}^ni$, we study…
The Feynman checkerboard problem is an interesting path integral approach to the Dirac equation in `1+1' dimensions. I compare two approaches reported in the literature and show how they may be reconciled. Some physical insights may be…
Given a graph $G$ and two independent sets $I_s$ and $I_t$ of size $k$, the independent set reconfiguration problem asks whether there exists a sequence of $k$-sized independent sets $I_s = I_0, I_1, I_2, \ldots, I_\ell = I_t$ such that…
In this paper, the recoverable robust shortest path problem under interval uncertainty representations is discussed. This problem is known to be strongly NP-hard and also hard to approximate in general digraphs. In this paper, the class of…
We propose a new exact approach for solving integer linear programming (ILP) problems which we will call projective splitting algorithms (PSAs). Unlike classical methods for solving ILP problems, PSAs conduct the search for the optimal…
Block-structured integer linear programs (ILPs) play an important role in various application fields. We address $n$-fold ILPs where the matrix $\mathcal{A}$ has a specific structure, i.e., where the blocks in the lower part of…
We investigate a stochastic process where a rectangle breaks into smaller rectangles through a series of horizontal and vertical fragmentation events. We focus on the case where both the vertical size and the horizontal size of a rectangle…