It's not as good as beard-cutting, but the birthday paradox makes a nice class discussion in a class of 30 or so. (Once I got unlucky in a class of 35 and they all had distinct birthdays... which only happens with probability 0.18.) Cris On Apr 27, 2014, at 2:02 PM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
Ha! As a grad student at Berkeley, I cut off one half of my beard, just for fun, and left it that way for several months. Never thought of the pedagogical applications, though.
--Dan
P.S. Nu, so how many hairs *are* in a beard?
Veit Elser wrote:
----- beard bisection
When word came down from on high, “teach them how to estimate”, I responded by estimating the number of hairs in a beard. At the first lecture I showed up with a full beard, the second with half shaved off, etc. each time with yet another half removed. When there was just a few square mm of beard left we counted the hairs. ----- _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
Cristopher Moore Professor, Santa Fe Institute The Nature of Computation Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens Available now at all good bookstores, or through Oxford University Press http://www.nature-of-computation.org/