Thursday, July 2, 2015

Playing with Math: Inspiring Online Conversations

First sighting of a comment on a mathematical blog post that was inspired by seeing the content in my book...



Jonathan Halabi writes jd2718. His post, Puzzle: Who am I?, became one of the puzzles in Playing with Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers.



Today Lara H replied to his post:
I came across this puzzle in the book “Playing with Math.” I found a different solution based on a wrong assumption I made at the beginning of solving the puzzle. I was thinking that a number with 3 digits also has 2 digits so I made both of those statements true and came up with 4097, which works for all the other conditions.

I responded with:
I’d say ‘different interpretation’ instead of ‘wrong assumption’. I wonder how many solutions the puzzle has using your interpretation. (Pretty exciting to see my book has inspired new discussion on Jonathan’s blog post!)

We are hoping that the book will inspire online conversations. This is the first drop of what we hope will eventually become a deluge.  

2 comments:

  1. She understood the words differently than I'd intended - though the wording really could support either interpretation.

    I could reword the question in the future to remove the ambiguity.

    I guess this is something that happens when a problem is shared with a wider audience! Cool. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think the more common interpretation is what you intended. I'm happy to leave it the way it is in the book.

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