Related papers: Variations on the two-child problem
A given subset $A$ of natural numbers is said to be complete if every element of $\mathbb{N}$ is the sum of distinct terms taken from $A$. This topic is strongly connected to the knapsack problem which is known to be NP complete.…
Any rational number can be factored into a product of several rationals whose sum vanishes. This simple but nontrivial fact was suggested as a problem on a maths olympiad for high-school students. We completely solve similar questions in…
A large family of words must contain two words that are similar. We investigate several problems where the measure of similarity is the length of a common subsequence. We construct a family of n^{1/3} permutations on n letters, such that…
A famous (and hard) chess problem asks what is the maximum number of safe squares possible in placing $n$ queens on an $n\times n$ board. We examine related problems from placing $n$ rooks. We prove that as $n\to\infty$, the probability…
"Mathematicians, like physicists, are pushed by a strong fascination. Research in mathematics is hard, it is intellectually painful even if it is rewarding, and you would not do it without some strong urge." [D. Ruelle]. We shall give some…
This article, based on a talk, treats some elementary, but not completely simple examples from probability. They concern multiple birthday coincidences, throwing dice, the combinatorics of the German card game "Doppelkopf", and the…
The twin paradox, which evokes from the the idea that two twins may age differently because of their relative motion, has been studied and explained ever since it was first described in 1906, the year after special relativity was invented.…
This short note deals with the so-called $ Sock \; Matching \; Problem$. We define $B_{n,k}$ as the number of all the finite sequences $a_1, \ldots, a_{2n}$ of nonnegative integers which contain at least one occurrence of $k$ $(1 \leq k…
The Secret Santa ritual, where in a group of people every member presents a gift to a randomly assigned partner, poses a combinatorial problem when considering the probabilities involved in the formation of pairs, where two persons exchange…
A double occurrence word $w$ over a finite alphabet $\Sigma$ is a word in which each alphabet letter appears exactly twice. Such words arise naturally in the study of topology, graph theory, and combinatorics. Recently, double occurrence…
The conjecture of Masser-Oesterl\'e, popularly known as $abc$-conjecture have many consequences. We use an explicit version due to Baker to solve a number of conjectures.
Suppose that your mother gave you n candies. You have to eat at least one candy each day. One possibility is to eat all n of them the first day. The other extreme is to make them last n days, and only eat one candy a day. Altogether, you…
This paper presents a solution to the Knights and Spies Problem: In a room there are n people, each labelled with a unique number between 1 and n. A person may either be a knight or a spy. Knights always tell the truth, while spies may…
I'll discuss how Goedel's paradox "This statement is false/unprovable" yields his famous result on the limits of axiomatic reasoning. I'll contrast that with my work, which is based on the paradox of "The first uninteresting positive whole…
`Twenty questions' is a guessing game played by two players: Bob thinks of an integer between $1$ and $n$, and Alice's goal is to recover it using a minimal number of Yes/No questions. Shannon's entropy has a natural interpretation in this…
A perfect number is a positive integer $N$ such that the sum of all the positive divisors of $N$ equals $2N$, denoted by $\sigma(N) = 2N$. The question of the existence of odd perfect numbers (OPNs) is one of the longest unsolved problems…
A popular variant of the collector's problem is the following: Assume there are $N$ different types of coupons with equal occurring probabilities. There is one main collector who collects coupons. When she gets a "double," she gives it to…
A necklace can be considered as a cyclic list of $n$ red and $n$ blue beads in an arbitrary order, and the goal is to fold it into two and find a large cross-free matching of pairs of beads of different colors. We give a counterexample for…
This work is devoted to solving some closely related open problems on the average and asymptotic behavior of the $2$-adic complexity of binary sequences. First, for fixed $N$, we prove that the expected value $E^{\mathrm{2-adic}}_N$ of the…
We estimate the deviation of the number of solutions of the congruence $$ m^2-n^2 \equiv c \pmod q, \qquad 1 \le m \le M, \ 1\le n \le N, $$ from its expected value on average over $c=1, ..., q$. This estimate is motivated by the recently…