Saturday Smorgasbord

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Now is the time on Sprockets 360 when we plagiarize share some of the fine things going on around the Internet.

Are you looking for some fun math problems to do? You can try out the bi-weekly Monday Math Madness. MMM #10 at Blinkdagger is a probability problem with a twist: if you know the probability of a group winning the lottery over 25 years, what is the probability of someone in the group winning the lottery at least once in a 5-year period? Solutions are due by Monday night/Tuesday morning at midnight. MMM #11 will appear the following Monday on Wild About Math.

There’s also a new regular math problem being posted. Walking Randomly has started posting an Integral of the Week. Integral #1 is $\int \sqrt{\tan(x)} \; dx$. (Incidentally, if you google “Walking Randomly” then the program suggests that you mean “Working Randomly”, which feels rather like my summer.)

Finally, why was 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 8 9. (Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week.) The Barenaked Ladies said it much better on this YouTube video, which I actually found here at Wiskundermeisjes, a site created by Ionica Smeets and Jeanine Daems. (This isn’t the first time I’ve stolen borrowed from them, either — I originally found the idea for Godzilla’s Sierpinski Cookies from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories on their site. Indeed, their site really makes me wish I could speak Dutch.)

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2 Responses to “Saturday Smorgasbord”

1. Ionica Says:

Great that you like our site! We deliberately decided to write our site in Dutch, since we try to write about mathematics for a broad audience. In another language it is much harder to get all the subtle details right and to make cute little word jokes. The advantage is that we are quite well-known in The Netherlands. The big disadvantage is of course that the rest of the world can not read our blog…

2. Ξ Says:

I’ve been impressed with the web-translations, though (via Google or Babel Fish, and there are probably others). It’s a little more work and it doesn’t pick up on all the nuances the way that someone who understood the language would, but it does allow me to get the jist of your site and some others in languages I don’t speak.