Ian Short

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Month: December, 2010

Tony Benn – Letters to my grandchildren

I recently found the book Letters to my grandchildren, by Tony Benn, in my local library. It consists of a series of short letters written by Tony Benn to his grandchildren, on different political themes.  I like Benn and I like the book. Here are four small parts. On power and control Letter 4 is about […]

Least integer game

Here is an exercise that can be performed with a group of at least three people. Each person secretly writes down a positive integer. The person with the least positive integer that nobody else has written down wins the game. Everyone is aware of the object of the exercise. There seems to be game theory […]

A seminar by Tom Körner

Tom Körner gave a seminar here at the Open University a couple of weeks back about using the Baire Category Theorem to prove a quantitative form of a theorem of Rudin. Tom made some passing remarks on the Central Limit Theorem, which I discuss and develop in this post. Central Limit Theorem. Let X1, X2,… […]

Graph theory and game theory

Some months ago I discussed the following problem with Steve Hewson and Mike Pearson after an NRICH meeting. Two people play a game with a finite graph. They take turns in colouring the uncoloured vertices of the graph, one vertex at a time. One player colours vertices red, and the other player colours vertices green. […]