Overview

This collection will give students (high school or beyond), teachers, and university professors a chance to experience the pleasure of wrestling with some beautiful problems of elementary mathematics. Readers can compare their sleuthing talents with those of Sherlock Holmes, who made a bad mistake regarding the first problem in the collection: Determine the direction of travel of a bicycle that has left its tracks in a patch of mud. Which Way did the Bicycle Go? contains a variety of other unusual and interesting problems in geometry, algebra, combinatorics, and number theory. For example, if a pizza is sliced into eight 45-degree wedges meeting at a point other than the center of the pizza, and two people eat alternate wedges, will they get equal amounts of pizza? Or: What is the rightmost nonzero digit of the product $1\cdot 2\cdot 3\cdots 1,000,000$? Or: Is a manufacturer's claim that a certain unusual combination lock allows thousands of combinations justified? Complete solutions to the 191 problems are included along with problem variations and topics for investigation.

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9781470463823

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These problems have charm and character. Many have unexpected twists. I couldn't put the book down. The style of the book is informal. Many of the problems are phrased in a natural, non-mathematical way. ... The problems in Which Way' were designed to appeal to undergraduate students, though they will also appeal to graduate students, high school students, and most any mathematician. - Daniel H. Ullman, The American Mathematical Monthly

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