How To Vote Mathematically!

[This is a back issue of one of this site’s newsletters]

About half of you reading this are from the United States. At least, that’s my guess, based on my website‘s traffic statistics.

About a quarter – half of that half – will be voting in the coming Presidential Election, or have already done so. At least, that’s my guess, based on turnout stats I skim-read on Wikipedia.

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Deconstructing April Fool’s Day

Okay, I admit it – my previous blog post was published on April 1. The foundations of mathematics are not really under attack, not now. But they were once!

Here’s a famous puzzle: imagine a village barber, who cuts the hair of everyone who doesn’t cut their own hair. Sounds simple enough, but who cuts the barber’s hair?

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What Is Counting?

My son asked me a riddle this afternoon – “What goes up but never down?”

I said “An elevator!”

He seemed surprised by my answer, so I said “Voyager I!”

Then he complained that the riddle was so generic, there were millions of possible answers. I asked him if there was some traditional answer I was supposed to give, and he said that he didn’t know of one.

Do you?

Continue reading What Is Counting?