"What's the easiest unsolved math problem to explain?" I asked my dad tonight, just out of curiosity. I asked because the two obvious, famous answers - Fermat's last theorem and the four-color problem - are both (probably) solved.

Well, I can't guarantee the actual answer is here, but a few candidates he pointed me to:

• The P = NP problem: if the ( Read more... )

This is why I love The Internet Oracle.

The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply.
Your question was:

Oh most canny Oracle, to whom every function is integrable analytically,

If fifteen people get on a bus, and then twelve more people get on a bus, how old is the driver?

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

Twenty-seven.^H^H^H^ ( Read more... )

Remember my entry last Monday? Did you know my house is just about 4° off compass?

Yeah, I didn't either. Can I get a "not cool"?

Let's start with my door, shall we? Bedroom door, closed at night because the light on the corner of the industrial park shines right down the hallway, and it's aligned just about like this:

___ ( Read more... )

Something occurred to me a few days ago you might find interesting. You know how a lot of people, when naming impossibilities, will say "square circles"? They're wrong.

Now, I'm going to do this right, so watch.

1. Circle: the locus of points of a fixed distance (called the radius) from a specified point (called the center).

2. Square: a ( Read more... )

Point nines recurring [1] equals one.

I understand that this claim is intuitively displeasing to many intelligent people. "Point nine recurring doesn't equal one!", they say, and give various reasonable accounts of why the two should be distinguished. However, as an engineer, I submit to the reader that we should equate them, however displeasing it ( Read more... )