Mr. Markov Plays Chutes and Ladders
Readers with children (or readers who were themselves once children) may be farnilar with the simple board game of Ch...
A Tour of Graphical Typesetting on the Macintosh
This article began as a comparative review of Macintosh programs for producing publication-quality graphics, inspired...
Optimal Blackjack Strategy with 'Lucky Bucks'
In the casino game blackjack or 21, mathematically determined best plays have been calculated by various mathematicia...
Mathematical Developments in 1992
Mathematical research in 1992 revealed a surprising connection between a newly discovered means of checking proofs an...
Timing the Blind Watchmaker: Comments on an Evolution Model of Richard Dawkins
In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins [1986al argues for the feasibility of evolution using a simple stoc...
Municipal Recycling: Location and Optimality
Recycling is difficult for local governments because it is a multidimensional problem. Not only are there biological,...
Commentary on Rotations in 3-Space
The problem of computing rotations in three-dimensional Euclidean space has been widely studied. It arises in many ar...
Tank Calibration: Practical Examples in Approximation Techniques
The topic of tank calibration provides an ideal setting for introducing important ideas in computational mathematics....
Professors' Commentary: The Politics of Course Time Slots
When one of the authors (Campbell) was a graduate student at Cornell in the late 1960s, he never ceased to be amazed ...
The Dynamical Systems Health Center: A Mathematical Model of a Diet and Exercise Program
This paper began as a class assignment for Prof. James Sandefur's Discrete Dynamical Systems course at Georgetown Uni...
Practitioner's Commentary: Diet Models
Author Cherry presents in this issue of The UMAP Iournal a mathematical model of the effects of diet and exercise on ...
A Case Study in Scheduling Courses
A frequent problem that college students face is that of scheduling their courses. Part of the problem stems from req...
The Solow Model of Economic Growth
The production of goods by a country depends on the capital available for investment and the number of workers in the...
Practitioner's Commentary: Card Shuffling
Brad Mann has done an excellent job of explaining various card-shuffling results. That of Bayer and Diaconis is parti...
Mathematical Developments in 1993
Mathematical discoveries in 1993 included a new polyhedron that will fill space only aperiodically, an algorithm for ...
Chase Problems
College football is a favorite American spectator sport, so a differential equations project involving football is al...
How Many Times Should You Shuffle a Deck of Cards?
How many times do you have to shuffle a deck of cards in order to mix them reasonably well? The answer is about seven...
The Combinatorics of Mancala-Type Games: Ayo, Tchoukaillon, and l/Pie
Around the world, hundreds of different kinds of mancala games have been observed [Deshayes et al. 1976; Murray 1978;...
Realistic Calculus Optimization
Many students are introduced to mathematical modeling through the max/min problems of one-variable calculus. However,...
Optimal Klappenspiel
The game Klappenspiel (flipping game) is a traditional German game of flipping tiles according to dice rolls. In this...
Frustration solitaire
In this expository article, we discuss the rankderangement problem, which asks for the number of permutations of a de...
Playing Konane Mathematically: A Combinatorial Game-Theoretic Analysis
This article presents a combinatorial game-theoretic analysis of Konane, an ancient Hawaiian stone-jumping game. Comb...
Bidding Optimally on ' The Price Is Right '
What is the best strategy in the bidding game on The Rice Is Right? Over the last twenty-four years, the television g...
On Words and Symbols
College catalogs, not the most edifying reading available on most campuses, do occasionally reflect trends that signa...
The Prisoner's Dilemma
Albert W. Tucker's note (on the preceding page), which is published here for the first time, was the first written de...
Social Choice Theory
The question of how a group of individuals should choose from among a set of alternatives has drawn the attention of ...
Khachian's Algorithm
SOVIET DISCOVERY ROCKS MATHEMATICAL WORLD Last November, sensational headlines appeared widely in the news amid repo...
Nonnumeric Algorithms
For the first ten years of their existence, computers were used exclusively t o execute numerical calculations. In fa...
A Revolution in Secret Codes
In October, 1977, the respected Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers was startled to receive a cryptic w...
Microcomputer Graphics
Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. In our algebra, trigonometry, and calculus courses, we ackno...
Complex Numbers In Basic
First courses in abstract or modern applied algebra are concerned with the investigation of mathematical structures, ...
Numerical Algorithms
The term algorithm it self is derived from the name of a ninth century Persian author, Abu Jafar Mohammed ibn Musa a1...
Operating Systems
A computing system can, in general, be discussed from two points of view: its hardware and its software. In this cont...
Holomorphic Functions
What accounts for these differences betweeen real and complex differentiable functions? First, when z and f ( z ) are...
Structured Programming
In t he early days of the computer industry, the development of software proceeded ad hoc. As technological advances ...
LOGO is for Learning
LOGO is a computer language invented by Seymour Papert at the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the late s...