Simulation of systems offers the opportunity for thorough understanding, if accessible computer software is available. We examine two such software packages, STELLA® and ExtendTM, along with characteristics of situations amenable to simulation. It is...
What percentage of the labor force is unemployed? What percentage of household budgets is devoted to shelter? How rapidly is the cost of medical care rising? Answers to such questions are staples of news reporting in all developed nations. If the...
The solitaire game "Tchuka Ruma" is described as follows in the book of mathematical diversions by Degrazia [1948, 102-103]: Tchuka Ruma is an East Indian game which can be played with the most primitive equipment, such as a number of holes and some...
"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...
A heat exchanger is used to cool a hot liquid or to heat a cold liquid. An example of a heat exchanger in your home is the water heater, which heats cold water by transferring heat from burning gas or from electrically heated metal. In industry, a...
When asked in the late 19th century to explain his success at the plate, baseball Hall-of-Famer "Wee Willie" Keeler responded quite simply, " . . . I hit 'em where they ain't." While we will always associate this famous quote with Keeler, it is the...
The Senior Seminar of the Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science at Ripon College decided to work as a consultancy group in 1996-97. Its client was a local printing company, Ripon Community Printers (RCP). This report outlines the year-long effort...
The Netherlands is a very flat country: there are no hills in the western part at all, except for a row of dunes that protect the land against the sea. These sand dunes are mostly 30 to 60 feet high and at places even lower. A large part of the...
In this paper we present three examples illustrating the use of combinatorics in computing probabilities relevant to the interpretation of data from immunological experiments. We first show that the probability of 5 or fewer different genes being...
"The Cowboys deserved to lose" [Associated Press 1995]. This terse assessment by John Madden, esteemed sportscaster with the Fox television network and Super Bowl-winning former National Football League (NFL) coach, seemed to have grossly understated...
Have you ever wondered how music is stored on a compact disc and then reproduced? Mathematically, the music can be viewed as a function in time. To record the music on a disc, the function is converted to a series of numbers that represent the...
To get around an old California law that prohibits the game of "21," California card casinos introduced a variation of standard Blackjack, called LA Blackjack, in which the objective is to get as close as possible to 22 without going over. The standard...
The object of the jeopardy dice game Pig is to be the first player to reach 100 points. Each player's turn consists of repeatedly rolling a die. After each roll, the player is faced with two choices: roll again, or hold (decline to roll again). • If...
In the springs of 1999 and 2001, I incorporated a series of Mathematica projects or "labs" into a vector analysis course. These labs used the technology of a computer algebra system to develop further a particular concept, solve an application, or...
When a colleague from the Biology Dept. who knew I was interested in flowers introduced me to C.L. Porter's Taxonomy of Flowering Plants [1967], I was struck immediately by the diagrams of the common inflorescences. An inflorescence is the arrangement...
Owing to the enormous popularity of competitive running, there has long been widespread interest in finding methods to predict performance in races. The first and best known of many mathematical models dealing with running performance originally...
We examine the interaction of growth and productivity. We put forth a very simple model to enable managers to understand better what occurs as new team members are integrated into an existing organization. While the model is straightforward, it does...
We discuss the dynamics of ski skating, in particular, the optimization problem: Maximize average speed for a given power. We begin with a mathematical model of ski skating. To simplify the analysis, we limit our attention to ski skating with no poles...
As everyone knows, a row of dominoes, all standing on edge, will undergo a cascade when the first domino is tipped. Building on several previous studies of this phenomenon, this paper uses both video experiments and mathematical modeling to give a more...
Introduction Mathematical cranks-those people who incorrectly think that they have trisected the angle, squared the circle, proved Fermat's Last Theorem better than Andrew Wiles did, settled the Goldbach Conjecture, and so on-we will always have with...