Mathematics Commons^™

Almost Periodic Factorization Of Certain Block Triangular Matrix Functions, Ilya M. Spitkovsky, Darryl H. Yong

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Let

where , and . For rational such matrices are periodic, and their Wiener-Hopf factorization with respect to the real line always exists and can be constructed explicitly. For irrational , a certain modification (called an almost periodic factorization) can be considered instead. The case of invertible and commuting , was disposed of earlier-it was discovered that an almost periodic factorization of such matrices does not always exist, and a necessary and sufficient condition for its existence was found. This paper is devoted mostly to the situation when is not invertible but the commute pairwise (). The complete description is …

The Best Way To Knock 'M Down, Arthur T. Benjamin, Matthew T. Fluet '99

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

"Knock 'm Down" is a game of dice that is so easy to learn that it is being played in classrooms around the world. Although this game has been effective at developing students' intuition about probability [Fendel et al. 1997; Hunt 1998], we will show that lurking underneath this deceptively simple game are many surprising and highly unintuitive results.

Bounds On A Bug, Arthur T. Benjamin, Matthew T. Fluet '99

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

In the game of Cootie, players race to construct a "cootie bug" by rolling a die to collect component parts. Each cootie bug is composed of a body, a head, two eyes, one nose, two antennae, and six legs. Players must first acquire the body of the bug by rolling a 1. Next, they must roll a 2 to add the head to the body. Once the body and head are both in place, the remaining body parts can be obtained in any order by rolling two 3s for the eyes, one 4 for the nose, two 5s for the …