Quote:
Originally Posted by Ensign Steve
Then again, this course isn't about multiplying logs and/or dividing exponents, so it's not really their fault that I'm still clueless about that shit.
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Some people just have a gift for mathematics.
There was a famous puzzle going around in the 1920s:
Two bicyclists start out twenty miles apart and both cycle towards a meeting place, each at a steady ten miles per hour. A fly perched on the front of the front tyre of one bicycle takes off as the bike begins to move and proceeds to fly back and forth between the bicycles at a steady 15mph until it is eventually crushed when the two bicycles meet. How far does the fly fly?
Now there is a difficult way to solve this which involves calculating where the bicycles are whenever the fly reaches one of them and then adding together all the distances (there are actually an infinity of them - that poor fly makes a hell of a lot of about turns in the final fraction of a second).
And there is an easy way, which is to note that the bicycles will collide after exactly one hour - and as the fly is flying at 15mph then it will have travelled fifteen miles.
The famous polymath, John Von Neumann (who invented the merge sort!!) was asked the puzzle and provided the correct answer almost instantaneously. The disappointed person that posed the puzzle to him asked, "Had you heard it before, or did you work out the trick for yourself?"
"There's a trick?" replied Von Neumann, "all I did was sum the geometric series."