Friday, November 5, 2010

A Look At Pascal's Triangle

In his book "Wonder of Numbers" Clifford Pickover names the following article as having the "all-time strangest title" of any published mathematical paper:

Granville, A. (1992) "Zaphod Beeblebox's brain and the fifty-ninth row of Pascal's Triangle" American Mathematical Monthly April, 99(4): 318-331.

The paper (pdf) can be found here:

http://www.gianpierobiancoli.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/beeb.pdf

And if you don't know who the character Zaphod Beeblebrox is (from "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") you can check him out here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaphod_Beeblebrox

In other matters, a quickie intro to the Riemann Hypothesis from Matt Parker here:


http://tinyurl.com/2arhu4r 

[includes the mention that "All prime numbers (greater than five) squared are one more than a multiple of 24."]

And revisiting Mr. Fermat:

x^n + y^n = z^n  ...NO solutions for n ≥ 3

x^n + y^n = z^(n-1) ...INFINITELY many solutions for all n ≥ 3

proof:

http://tinyurl.com/2d5qucy

No comments: