Rutgers mathematician E.P. Starke posed this question in the American Mathematical Monthly of July 1940:

“In high school geometry texts and elsewhere one frequently meets the statement that the reason for the straightness of the crease in a folded piece of paper is that the intersection of two planes is a straight line. This is fallacious. What is the correct reason?”

I was going to post this as a puzzle, but after much pondering I’ve been unable to make sense of the answer. Here it is:

“Let P, P′ be two points of the paper that are brought into coincidence by the process of folding. Then any point A of the crease is equidistant from P, P′, since the lines AP, AP′ are pressed into coincidence. Hence the crease, being the locus of such points A, is the perpendicular bisector of PP′.”

I agree that this is true, but I don’t see what’s wrong with the first answer. Any ideas?

UPDATE: The consensus seems to be that the first answer makes some invalid assumptions, including flat planes and Euclidean space, where Starke’s proof is more rigorous. Thanks to everyone who’s written in.

(Second update, on reflection: Presumably the books that Starke mentions were not claiming that all creases must be straight, only that a straight crease is so because two planes intersect in a line. That still seems reasonable to me.)

A visitor to Niels Bohr’s cottage noticed a horseshoe nailed over the door.

“Surely you don’t expect that a horseshoe will bring good luck?” asked the visitor.

“No, I don’t,” Bohr said. “But they say it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

See The Misfortune Field.

What’s the key to this curious sequence of numbers?

1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, 312211, 13112221, 1113213211, …

When read aloud, each term describes the one that precedes it. The first term consists of “one 1,” the second of “two 1s,” the third of “one 2, then one 1,” and so on.

That seems pretty arbitrary, but it opens a door into an unsuspected mathematical universe. Start with any number (except 22, an obvious dead end) and it will produce a string of digits that lengthens by about 30 percent with each generation — indeed, the percentage approaches a predictable constant (30.3577269 …) as the length approaches infinity.

More amazingly, the growing string will organize itself into a series of recognizable finite substrings that evolve predictably with each generation. John Horton Conway, who discovered all this, identified 92 such substrings, which he named after the chemical elements. Thus “uranium” (3) decays into “protactinium” (13), which becomes “thorium” (1113), and so on.

Thus an infinitely complex universe can arise from simply reading the number 1 aloud.

For any convex polyhedron,

vertices – edges + faces = 2

In 1988, readers of the Mathematical Intelligencer judged this the world’s second most beautiful theorem — behind Euler’s identity.

Trisect the angles of any triangle and you’ll find an equilateral triangle at its heart.

This theorem has a curious cousin: If you trisect the sides of any triangle and erect an equilateral triangle outwardly on the middle third of each leg, then the outermost vertices of these equilateral triangles will themselves form an equilateral triangle.

O Cleinias, are those who learn the wise or the ignorant?

He answered that those who learned were the wise.

Euthydemus proceeded: There are some whom you would call teachers, are there not?

The boy assented.

And they are the teachers of those who learn — the grammar-master and the lyre master used to teach you and other boys; and you were the learners?

Yes.

And when you were learners you did not as yet know the things which you were learning?

No, he said.

And were you wise then?

No, indeed, he said.

But if you were not wise you were unlearned?

Certainly.

You then, learning what you did not know, were unlearned when you were learning?

The youth nodded assent.

Then the unlearned learn, and not the wise, Cleinias, as you imagine.

— Plato, Euthydemus