CTK Insights

An article under that caption appeared in the Computers and Mathematics with Applications, 59 (2010) 296-297, published by ELSEVIER, a world-wide publisher. I hope the article is a hilarious joke. It is very short. So short, it can be included in a single quote of a decent length. The reason I am concerned is that [...]

Some time ago, a group of educational leaders has published a document in The Washington Post How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders. The document was soon scathingly criticized in the same paper by Kevin G. Welner, professor of education policy and program evaluation in the [...]

Here's an ancient but still popular puzzle: Three people check into a hotel. They pay $30 to the manager and go to their room. The manager finds out that the room rate is $25 and gives $5 to the bellboy to return. On the way to the room the bellboy reasons that $5 would be [...]

This is a strange question. If it can be fun anywhere else, so, too, it can be fun in the US. Why not? Can it be fun for every one in the US or elsewhere? I doubt it. It seems to me that blaming the state of math education in the US became a custom, [...]

Now almost forgotten, the book My Brother, My Enemy by Mitchell Wilson was among the favorites with my high school friends. (Wilson wrote a more popular book that was made in a movie Live with Lightning, but eventually this one, too, has disappeared from the shelves.) As teenagers, we've been used to quote from the [...]

In mathematics, even the most obvious properties need to be proved, unless of course they are accepted as axioms. The following one seems pretty much obvious and still requires a proof: P is a variable point on the arc of a circle cut off by the chord AB. Prove the intuitively obvious property that the [...]

This is something that just ought to be shared. David M. Bradley from the University of Maine came up with a shortest proof of the countability of the rational numbers. The year is 2010. Every integer is uniquely represented in the form 2pq, where p ≥ 0, q ≥ 1, q an odd number. For [...]

On a recent LinkedIn discussion the following problem came up apparently by accident: Half As are Bs, half Bs are Cs, and half Cs are As. What are the possible ratios of |A| to |C|? (|X| above is the number of elements in set X.) Let |A| = a, |B| = b, and |C| = [...]