Wayne sprung this question on me yesterday. I swear he should have been a CS major.

The Hundred Hatted Prisoners
There are a hundred prisoners in a dungeon, sentenced to be executed the next morning. Fortunately for them, the king of the land is eccentric and offers them a chance to survive. He tells [...]

The votes from Friday’s Simple Probability Puzzle are in. Here was the question:
Imagine there’s a completely random event with two outcomes, say flipping a coin. Each flip has an equal probability of landing heads or tails. Now imagine that we’re interested in seeing how long it takes to get a certain sequence of outcomes.
Pattern [...]

Ever wonder why so many expert witnesses lead juries astray due to mathematical errors? Or why so many gamblers and investors are so bad at assessing relatively simple probability questions? First imagine that you consider yourself an expert (at something other than math), and then you encounter a question like this…
Imagine there’s a [...]

This is fascinating video about Daniel Tammet, a twenty-something with extraordinary mental abilities. He’s capable of calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and he can acquire functional fluency in a foreign language in a single week. Most interesting is that unlike the vast majority of savants, he can communicate with and [...]

This is a recent test used in England:

Royal Society of Chemistry
Here’s a Chinese math test:

I’m so shocked by the sheer amount of ignorant, yet argumentative idiots on Digg that I can barely even muster up a real rant. There’s an article by a math teacher explaining the common confusion his students have with the idea that 1 = .9999… repeating. He went to great lengths to explain [...]

After not seeing any more feature requests or error reports on my tool for converting Chinese numbers, I’ve decided it’s stable enough to present to the Chinese-forums readers. At this point, I can honestly say it offers significantly more functionality than any other online tool for converting Chinese numbers into digits and it does [...]

Last night, I went back to Taibei to play chess with my old co-workers. It’s kinda scary, really. They’ve all been playing regularly, Martin’s been reading books on strategy, and I fully expect to get left way behind in terms of ability shortly. Mike W. was there, though and the topic turned [...]