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To mark the publication of issue 200, Tangente organized a problem-writing competition. Nine of the forty-three puzzles submitted received prizes, but many others deserved one too. We asked the jury members to single out their personal favorites.
Artists using mathematics: nothing new there. But artists posing optimization problems that mathematicians still cannot solve: now that is surprising! One seemingly innocuous conjecture about drawing graphs has resisted all attempts at proof for fifty years.
Numbers and measurement have followed parallel paths throughout history. While it is easy to assign a number to a length or volume, this becomes more difficult for properties that are not linear, such as temperature or the acidity of a solution.
The appeal of recreational mathematics is that it requires little formal knowledge. Yet there are ingenious techniques that are hardly ever taught.
