相关论文: On the Lottery Problem: Tracing Stefan Mandel's Co…
We give estimates on the number of combinatorial designs, which prove (and generalise) a conjecture of Wilson from 1974 on the number of Steiner Triple Systems. This paper also serves as an expository treatment of our recently developed…
Consider a fair lottery over the natural numbers in which the selected number is removed. This lottery is iterated countably infinite times, with a known ratio of iterations to natural numbers. Removed numbers are not replaced. The natural…
The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…
The Collatz map is defined for a positive even integer as half that integer, and for a positive odd integer as that integer threefold, plus one. The Collatz conjecture states that when the map is iterated the number one is eventually…
Following an idea of Rowland we give a conjectural way to generate increasing sequences of primes using algorithms involving the gcd. These algorithms seem not so useless for searching primes since it appears we found sometime primes much…
The Coupon Collector Problem (CCP) is a well-known combinatorial problem that seeks to estimate the number of random draws required to complete a collection of $n$ distinct coupon types. Various generalizations of this problem have been…
Consider $2k-1$ voters, each of which has a preference ranking between $n$ given alternatives. An alternative $A$ is called a Condorcet winner, if it wins against every other alternative $B$ in majority voting (meaning that for every other…
We develop and deploy a set of constraints for the purpose of calculating minimal sizes of lottery designs. Specifically, we find the minimum number of tickets of size six which are needed to match at least two balls on any draw of size…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
This paper investigates the connections between combinatorial design theory and the creation of new forms of poetry through a specific combinatorial structure called Steiner triple systems. We introduce five original poems constructed using…
As Collatz conjecture is still to be proved, a method to arrive at the complete proof is explored here. Conceptually, the process relies on the pre-proven sequence data and the method follows the confirmation of the convergence of the…
Unusually large prize pools in lotteries like Mega Millions and Powerball attract additional bettors, which increases the likelihood that multiple winners will have to share the pool. Thus, the expected value of a lottery ticket decreases…
The 1936 Mills Futurity slot machine had the feature that, if a player loses 10 times in a row, the 10 lost coins are returned. Ethier and Lee (2010) studied a generalized version of this machine, with 10 replaced by deterministic parameter…
The monic sequence that shifts left under convolution with itself is the Catalan numbers with 130+ combinatorial interpretations. Here we establish a combinatorial interpretation for the monic sequence that shifts left under composition: it…
The Collatz Conjecture (also known as the 3x+1 Problem) proposes that the following algorithm will, after a certain number of iterations, always yield the number 1: given a natural number, multiply by three and add one if the number is odd,…
Can you decide if there is a coincidence in the numbers counting two different combinatorial objects? For example, can you decide if two regions in $\mathbb{R}^3$ have the same number of domino tilings? There are two versions of the…
It is well-known that many famous pooling designs are constructed from mathematical structures by the "containment matrix" method. In this paper, we propose another method and obtain a family of pooling designs with surprisingly high degree…
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…
In late May of 2014 I received an email from a colleague introducing to me a non-transitive game developed by Walter Penney. This paper explores this probability game from the perspective of a coin tossing game, and further discusses some…
In 1973, Neil Sloane published a very short paper introducing an intriguing problem: Pick a decimal integer $n$ and multiply all its digits by each other. Repeat the process until a single digit $\Delta(n)$ is obtained. $\Delta(n)$ is…