Bowlizza: The Mathematics Department's Annual Bowling and Pizza Extravaganza

Please join us at 11:00 am on Saturday, February 17, for the Math Department's annual bowling and pizza party.  We'll meet at Holland Bowling, located at the corner of 9th and Central, and after a couple games of bowling return to the math department for pizza.  Students and professors alike will engage in friendly competition for a variety of noteworthy feats (e.g. highest score, most strikes, largest standard deviation), with prizes for the winners.

Sign up sheets will be passed around in your classes.  There will also be a sign up sheet on Professor Pearson's door (VWF 212) for you to sign up before noon on Friday, February 16.  A reminder will be sent in upcoming issues of the newsletter.  Mark your calendars and save the date!


2007: The Year of Euler

The Mathematics Association of America (MAA) has dubbed 2007 "The Year of Euler," in honor of the 300th anniversary of the great mathematician's birthday.  Among Euler's 866 (!) published papers are some of the most foundational results in the history of mathematics.  Euler (pronounced "oil-er") is responsible for the famous formula
He also showed that for any simply connected (i.e. genus 0) polyhedron with V vertices, E edges, and F faces,
and although his proof contains some minor technical flaws, Euler demonstrated that
a fact which Calculus 2 students this semester will encounter in their studies of infinite series. 

Recently, Swiss  Radio International announced that Sudoku puzzles were not in fact Japanese but instead had been discovered by Euler (see http://puzzles.about.com/od/sudokupuzzles/p/leonardeuler.htm for details).  Whether that claim is true is far from clear, but Euler certainly did study magic squares, which form the basis of Sudoku puzzles (see http://www.conceptispuzzles.com/articles/sudoku/ for more information). 

Euler's contributions are even more impressive when one considers that he was forced to rely on memory to visualize mathematics after enduring many difficulties with his vision and becoming essentially blind by age 64.  Euler put his blindness in perspective: "Now I will have fewer distractions."  Indeed, Euler's visual impairment did not decrease his productivity.  

To read more about Euler, please visit http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Euler.html, and to view some of Euler's original works, check out the Euler Archive at http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~euler/.  For those who are really serious about learning more this astonishing Swiss mathematician, please visit http://www.maa.org/euler_trip/ to learn more about the two-week tour of Basel, Berlin, and St. Petersburg (July 1 -- 14) the MAA has organized to visit the places Euler lived and worked.


2006: The Year of Mathematics

"When Science magazine declares that the proof of a theorem in mathematics is the breakthrough of the year in all of science," writes Keith Devlin (http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_12_06.html),  "you know that something special has occurred."  Science magazine declared the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture the most significant scientific breakthrough of the year in its December 22 issue (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5807/1848), the first time Science has awarded this distinction to mathematics.  For his proof, the reclusive Russian-born mathematician Grigory Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal but astonishingly declined the world's most prestigious prize in mathematics.  The implications of the Poincaré Conjecture are wide and deep -- they concern the shape of the universe -- and so it is perhaps not surprising that Science would deem this achievement the scientific breakthrough of the year.  It is interesting to note, Devlin writes, that "Discover magazine also listed the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture as one of the top 100 science stories of 2006, but they ranked it as number 8. Their story led off with a conjecture of its own: that the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture may turn out to be the number 1 math story of the entire 21st century."


Problem of the Fortnight 

Whether Euler actually discovered Sudoku puzzles, as Swiss Radio International claims, or their history extends deeper into history, one thing is undisputed: they're really fun!  And so, we tip our hats to "The Year of Euler" by offering the following Sudoku puzzle as our first Problem of the Fortnight of the New Year.  Fill in the blank cells so that each row, each column and each 3 x 3 block contains the digits 1 through 9 exactly once.


Problem Solvers of the Fortnight 

The last Problem of the Fortnight from last semester came to us from Mr. Vern Hoekstra of Zeeland, MI.  Mr. Hoekstra inquired:

We have been playing golf from time to time with 16 people.  In our group there are four levels of handicaps -- let's call them A, B, C, and D --  and there are four people with each handicap level -- so we could let A1, A2, A3 and A4 represent the four people with handicap level A, and so on for the other handicap levels.  On the first day we might have: 

Team 1	A1	B1	C1	D1
Team 2	A2	B2	C2	D2
Team 3	A3	B3	C3	D3
Team 4	A4	B4	C4	D4

Is it possible for us to play four times a week so that each foursome has one person of each handicap level and so that no two people end up on the same team during the week? 

It is indeed possible to schedule four rounds of golf per week so that each foursome has one person of each handicap level and so that no two people end up on the same team during the week.  Congratulations to Matt Larson, Steve Wright, Cameron Calka, Stephanie Sherburn, Kinsey Wethers, Ben Berkel, Carleen Dykstra, Jacob Lyons, Ashley O'Shaughnessey, Julie Allerding, Jamin Drisner, Jeremiah Clements, Kevin Sietsema, Nachelle Oosterhouse, Allison Pautler, Kaitlyn Kopke, Alli Cole, Bryan McMahon, Amanda Allen, Amber Hoezee, Derek Terrell, Nathan Vance, Nicole Mulder, and Ryan Converse for devising a solution to this problem.