CTK Insights

In the Chinese calendar, years are named cyclically after the Chinese zodiac symbols: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, pig. Until 1912 the traditional Chinese calendar was the only one in use. Traditionally, the signs of the zodiac played a more universal role that included, e.g., the designations for time [...]

It's a rare pleasure to get a good book ahead of its planned publishing date. In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman by William Cook that was expected at the beginning of 2012, was delivered yesterday right to my door. My first impression is that this is the sort of a book that are read in [...]

I am not sure who coined the term "The Star of David Theorem" to designate the identities discovered in the early 1970s. There are in fact two of them, both related to the "Star of David" configuration in Pascal triangle (The diagram is courtesy wikipedia.org.) The first result discovered by Hoggatt and Hansell in 1971 [...]

Going through the old issues of the Mathematics Magazine, I have stumbled on the following note by Dawn Lindquist (Vol. 78, No. 3, Jun., 2005, p. 245) Mathematicians in the market for a car today have many choices. While analytic geometers might be drawn to the Ford Focus and algebraists may assume the Isuzu Axiom [...]

A problem for the innocent minds There is a well known problem of finding two points of the same color in the plane all points of which have been colored either red or blue distance 1 unit apart. It is simple but not trivial. This said what about finding two points of different colors under [...]