Other Mathematics Commons^™

Some Curious Cut-Ups, Jeremiah Farrell, Ivan Moscovich

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

We have noticed a certain kind of n-gon dissection into triangles that has a wonderful property of interest to most puzzlists. Namely that any two triangles have at least one edge in common yet no two triangles need be congruent. In an informal poll of specialists at a recent convention, none of them saw immediately how this could be accomplished. But in fact it is very straightforward.

The Magic Octahedron, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

An octahedral die has several advantages over its cubic cousin, not the least of which is its ability to magically model a four dimensional tesseract. We will use a four coloring of the die to illustrate the magic.

Octahedral Dice, Todd Estroff, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

All five Platonic solids have been used as random number generators in games involving chance with the cube being the most popular. Martin Gardenr, in his article on dice (MG 1977) remarks: "Why cubical?... It is the easiest to make, its six sides accomodate a set of numbers neither too large nor too small, and it rolls easily enough but not too easily."

Gardner adds that the octahedron has been the next most popular as a randomizer. We offer here several problems and games using octahedral dice. The first two are extensions from Gardner's article. All answers will be given …