Ariel Procaccia has thought a lot about how to cut cake over the last 15 years. That’s partly because the Harvard computer scientist has three children who among them have celebrated more than two dozen birthdays. He knows what it’s like to stand with a knife before a layered masterpiece, frosted with buttercream and chocolate curls, while pressed on all sides by small partygoers who instinctively recognize when someone else gets a better slice.
But it’s also because much of
Brits have puzzled over the best way to win the National Lottery ever since the first ever draw nearly 30 years ago.
Many of us have ‘lucky numbers’ that we pick week in week out, while others leave it to fate by making a selection at random.
Now, mathematicians claim they know how to guarantee a Lotto win – and tests by MailOnline suggest that it does indeed work.
Buying no less than 27 tickets, each with a specific combination
For most of us, when hooked on a gripping action sequence or in stitches at a comedy, the last thing we are thinking about is maths.
But some just cannot enjoy a movie or TV show if they know that Keanu Reeves would not have dodged that bullet, or Kate Winslet could moved over to let Leonardo DiCaprio fit on the door.
In fact, they go away and do the equations to show how Ross Geller could have got the
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While living in an internment camp in Vichy France, Alexander Grothendieck was tutored in mathematics by another prisoner, a girl named Maria. Maria taught Grothendieck, who was twelve, the definition of a circle: all the points that are equidistant from a given point. The definition impressed him with “its simplicity and clarity,” he wrote years later. The property of perfect rotundity had until then appeared to him
