CTK Insights

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 [...]

In their textbook Discrete Algorithmic Mathematics authors Stephen Maurer and Anthony Ralston offer a light-hearted example [pp. 217-221]: When checking into a hotel nowadays, sometimes a guest receives a four-digit "combination", not a key. On the door of each room is a keypad. Any time those four digits are entered in the proper sequence (regardless [...]