Other Mathematics Commons^™

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 …

The Eight Monarchs (Some Mathematical Magic), Jeremiah Farrell, Eric Nelson

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The eight Monarchs are the four Kings and four Queens of an ordinary deck of cards. We can perform our magic without a deck by using the grid below with the K-Q token ( a coin can be used instead if one wishes).

The Effect: The magician's back will be turned while Mark, the subject, places the token on one of the suit nodes. Mark is to remember this starting position. Then Mark makes a sequence of moves; a move being one of four possibilities: a horizontal move, a vertical move, or a diagonal move to a new node or …

The First Gathering, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The following is a photocopy of a letter I sent to my good friend James P. Fink shortly after the first Gathering in 1993. It is not reqritten or edited in any way in hopes of conveying to you some sense of my awe at how very special this event really way. My son David, then a student in Boston, was also privileged to be invited by Tom Rodgers and David and I still feel overwhelmed by the experience.

There are so many memories- and so many friends. After you have read the letter, I will remark on some of …

Cube Mentalism, Jeremiah Farrell, Ivan Moscovich

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Our tour of multidimensional cubes begins with the marking of the eight comers of a 3-cube with the eight words HOT, POT, POD, HOD, HAD, HAT, PAT, and PAD. The figure below shows how these eight inherit the labels of the HOT-PAD).die where the letter H is opposite P, the letter O is opposite T and the letter T is opposite the letter D...

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.

Prague Six, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Draft of the 'Solution Page' for Jeremiah's puzzle "Prague Six", which was exchanged at the 2008 Prague International Puzzle Party. 100 puzzle designers create 100 copies of their puzzle and pass it out at the party and exhange them. This puzzle is also mass produced by Kadon Enterprises as "Chasing Squares".

Disko Solution In Braille, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

A copy of a 4x4 DISKO solution in Braille. Constructed by students at the Indiana School for the Blind on magnetized squares on a "toasted", i.e. raised grid.

Farrell's Spider, Jeremiah Farrell, Ivan Moscovich

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Puzzle game featured in Ivan Moscovich's magnetic puzzle pack:

Place the 18 discs on the web so that the sum of the numbers on each of the three hexagons and on each of the three ribs equals 57.

Cube Puzzles, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Jeremiah Farrell's contribution to "The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler: A Collection in Tribute to Martin Gardner"

Martin Gardner = Mint! Grand! Rare!, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Jeremiah Farrell's contirbution to "The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler: A Collection in Tribute to Martin Gardner"

Related works:

The puzzle from figure one is also available in Colloquy (Wordways 14,2) online at: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol14/iss2/8/