Can anyone on the list help solve this mystery? Specifically, did any of you either use muffin problem as a homework problem shortly after it was posted to math-fun, or mention it to someone else who might have? Jim ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jeremy Copeland <copeland@artofproblemsolving.com> Date: Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 3:37 PM Subject: Re: Muffin problem origins To: James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> Cc: Joe Buhler <buhler@ccrwest.org>, Gary Antonick <gantonick@gmail.com>, Alan Frank <alan@8wheels.org> Hi Jim, The data is still inconclusive, but seductive. The earliest use of the problem in our classes seems to be Jan 21, 2009. It looks like the problem initially hit math-fun on Jan 2, 2009 (see below). That's a pretty tight window, but the fact that those are the same month would be a pretty interesting coincidence, given how things like these often flare up, spread, and then dissipate. I don't think we're going to find a smoking gun here, but my money is on Joe's theory. Jeremy

...

Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 03:17:35 +0000 From: James Propp <jpropp@cs.uml.edu> To: "math-fun@mailman.xmission.com" <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Subject: [math-fun] muffin problem

Alan Frank (a friend of mine and Andy Latto's) asks, what's the best way to divide m identical muffins among n people, so that each person gets the same amount of muffin (receiving either one piece of size m/n or several pieces whose sizes add up to m/n), where "best" means "so as to maximize the size of the smallest piece". On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 4:09 PM, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:

But we know when the problem was discussed on math-fun; doesn't the homework problem version pre-date that?

Jim

On Sunday, August 18, 2013, Joe Buhler <buhler@ccrwest.org> wrote:

...

Jim et al,

On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 08:07:23PM -0700, James Propp wrote:

...

You could say that the problem appears to have been invented

independently

...

...

by several people, including recreational mathematician Alan Frank.

It seems likely to me (though probably impossible to verify at this remove in time) that the problem ended up at Jeremy through some non-obvious ricochet from the math-fun discussion. So that the problem appears to have been invented by Alan, though independent discovery can't be ruled out. Hard to know how to phrase that exactly. It is a very natural and cute problem.

Joe