kern f

crossing a bridge at night 2

An interesting side problem to the bridge crossing puzzle is to find and generate all the possible ways of crossing the bridge under the constraints of the puzzle.

Here's how it can be solved.

piles of cool stuff

First off Google and their recruiting methods. This is old news but I want to have it here for the record. Our favorite cool company is using unusual methods to attract talent. It started in the summer with the billboard on 101.

Then in September Google Labs released the GLAT (Google Labs Aptitude Test). Yours truly was delusional enough to go cherry pick one of the problems in there and try solve it. I went for the geometry one (number 16). Of course I spent a couple of weekends in vain but I enjoyed the effort because I revisited all that long ago forgotten geometry material. When you're done with your GLAT solutions you can compare notes with the Mathematica guys.

What else is in the pile ? A couple of cool links:

• Combinatorics Through Guided Discovery is a great Combinatorics text book that presents the material through targeted exercises that let the reader discover it just like a true mathematician (a gently guided mathematician).
• This page by John Kennedy has a nice collection of introductory notes on pretty diverse mathematical subjects from modular arithmetic for the RSA algorithm to Bezier curves to the math modeling a lense to the number e and compound interest
• W. D. Joyner's notes on the Mathematics of the Rubik's cube.
• Three collections of online mathematics books and lecture notes: one, two and three.

And last but not least Delicious Monster with their soon to be released

Delicious Library

has been getting a lot of buzz. Personally I think it will be great to let my collection of books parade in front of my iSight producing a nice XML database that maybe, just maybe can somehow be turned into a bibtex file.