math and statistics puzzles

…is that Jan Nordgreen has finally lit, this time in France, and his math and puzzle blog, think again! is back on the air.  Hooray! Read more

Over at the Social Sciences Statistics Blog, Gary King proposes a set of problems in counting motivated by the possible ways of constructing orders in an ice cream shop. He quickly multiplies up to numbers that exceed the particle count for the entire universe. Of course, the next step is to count the number of Read more

My wife and I like to stay active, so one of our hobbies is amateur cross-country running.  We’re not very good, but we do like to run in weekend charity races.  We decided several years ago to favor small-town races over downtown ones, and smaller races over larger ones.  We’ve been pleased with these rules:  Read more

Craig McClain at Deep-Sea News always has something interesting and educational.  It’s a slow news day for him, so he posted a jigsaw puzzle made with this thing.  Cool.  Here’s one for the math and stats folks. Read more

The Reverend Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping comes up with the darndest things. This form for the quadratic formula, done in the style of an IRS worksheet, rings all too true, especially after this month’s massacre of my savings account. Read more

Jan Nordgreen over at think again! posed a fun probability problem about a hung-over gunfighter this morning. I’ve posted two possible solutions–Jan provided some additional data after I posted the first one, so I changed models. I swiped the model used in logistic regression, since it has a nice property. AND…I’ve posed my own problem Read more