I was never able to figure out the solution to Veit’s puzzle, the first time it came around or now, so at this point I’m prepared to swallow my pride and ask someone to email me the solution. Or maybe someone could send it to the whole list, with a spoiler-alert header page. (I miss ^L from the days of UNIX mail.) Jim Propp On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 8:09 AM Veit Elser <ve10@cornell.edu> wrote:
On Jun 2, 2020, at 9:50 PM, Michael Kleber <michael.kleber@gmail.com> wrote:
Wow, that "expected number of lonely people" problem is great! I've never seen this before, and did not expect it to come out so nicely.
—Michael
That problem can be recast as the “expected constellation size” problem I posed many years ago. It can be worked out in any number of dimensions.
In the night sky (2D) assume that the visible stars are uniformly distributed and form connected graphs (constellations) by joining each star with its nearest (angular) neighbor. What’s the expected number of stars per constellation?
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