A Mathematician's Holiday
Latest Episodes
Medicine muddle - Encoding and Binary
Given four bottles with indistinguishable liquid, one of which is a vital medicine, two containers and a test that can be done only once, how can you determine which of the the bottles contain the medicine?
Dim Sum - Coding efficiency
In a restaurant where you can order tasting plates of 10 items, what is the smallest number of plates you can order to identify all 10 items on a menu?
Fix the Hotel Rooms - Topology
By drawing on a piece of paper, can you connect three houses to three utilities (gas, electricity, water) without any of the lines crossing?
The Tiny Lift - Graphs
How can you get three people to the upper floor of the hotel if two of them can never be left alone?
Hotel fire - Optimisation
What is the quickest route to get from where you are standing, collect some water from a river and get to the hotel?
Bags mix-up- Logic and Decision Trees
Three bags contain 2 t-shirts or 2 hoodies or 1 hoodie and 1 t-shirt, and none are labelled correctly. Can you tell which back belongs to whom by only taking one (random) item from one bag?
Late for the plane - Abstraction and Optimisation
What is the quickest route between two points, if you can only cross the runways at a perpendicular?
Airport security - Trilinear Coordinates
How do we measure out 100ml of a liquid using only containers taking quantities of 75ml, 125ml and 200ml?
Planning the tour - Abstraction and Graph Theory
How do you construct a tour travelling between a number of different cities, but never using the same transport method between two cities more than once?