Recreational Maths Pubmeet

[jack]

Tonight is the monthly mathsjam, recreational maths pubmeet (at the castle from 7 onwards)

Does anyone remember any good puzzles we've previously talked about I should take along, preferably that you don't absolutely need a maths degree to understand the problem? (Most people will, in fact, have maths degrees, but puzzles unrelated to set theory are more traditional :))

Comments

[simont]

The generalised bottles problem, if you haven't done it before? (To recap: here's the earliest reference I've seen for the original problem, and the generalisation is "suppose you instead have n bottles around an n-gonal table which the referee can rotate by any multiple of 1/n of a turn, what's the minimum number of hands (or, equivalently, bottles you are permitted to touch and/or move per turn) needed to guarantee a win?".)

Have you done the bags of apples and oranges? (I have 99 bags, each containing some apples and some oranges; prove that there exists a subset of 50 bags containing at least half the apples and at least half the oranges.)

[jack]

I tried the bottles problem a previous month, and people were interested but didn't follow it far. The apples and oranges sounds good, thank you!