Two-Step

elkies position

In this position, devised by Harvard mathematician Noam Elkies, White is in serious trouble. He’s been reduced to a bare king, and his opponent has a knight as well as two pawns on the verge of queening.

It’s tempting to snap up the c2 pawn — this gains material and keeps Black’s king bottled up in the corner, which stops the a-pawn from queening. But now Black can win with 1. … Nd3! This stops the white king from moving to c1, which had been his only way to keep the black king immobilized. Now he’ll have to back off (even though perhaps winning the knight), and Black will play 2. … Kb1 and queen his pawn.

Interestingly, in the original position if White plays 1. Kc1, he’s guaranteed a draw: He can capture the c2 pawn on his next move and then shuffle happily forever between c1 and c2. Because he’s “lost a move,” Black can’t execute the maneuver described above to force the white king away from the corner. That’s because as the white king shuffles between a white and a black square, the knight must move about the board, also alternating between squares of different colors — and always landing on the wrong color to achieve his goal. The knight can wander as far afield as he likes, and execute any complex maneuver; he’ll always arrive at the wrong moment to achieve his aim.

(Noam D. Elkies and Richard P. Stanley, “The Mathematical Knight,” Mathematical Intelligencer 25:1 [December 2003], 22-34.)

All Covered

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Circle_packing_(hexagonal).svg

Can any 10 points on a plane always be covered with some number of nonoverlapping unit discs?

It’s not immediately clear that the answer is yes. The most efficient way to pack circles together on the plane is the hexagonal packing shown above; it covers about 90.69 percent of the surface. But if our 10 points are inconveniently arranged, it’s not clear that we’ll always be able to shift the array of circles around in order to get them all covered.

In this case there’s a neat proof that takes advantage of a technique called the probabilistic method — if, for a group of objects, the probability is less than 1 that a randomly chosen object does not have a certain property, then there must exist an object that has this property.

Take a hexagonal packing randomly. Then, for any point on the plane, the probability that it’s not covered by the chosen packing is about 1 – 0.9069 = 0.0931. This means that for any 10 points, the chance that one or more points are not covered is approximately 0.0931 × 10 = 0.931. And that’s less than 1.

“Therefore, we obtain from the principle that there exists some closest packing that covers all the 10 points,” writes mathematician Hirokazu Iwasawa of the Institute of Actuaries of Japan. “And, in such a packing, we actually need at most 10 discs to cover the 10 points.”

(Hirokazu Iwasawa, “Using Probability to Prove Existence,” Mathematical Intelligencer 34:3 [September 2012], 11-14. The puzzle was created by Naoki Inaba.)

Gödel’s Loophole

At Princeton in the 1940s, Albert Einstein became a close friend of logician Kurt Gödel, whose incompleteness theorems lie at the heart of modern mathematics. Toward the end of his life Einstein said that his “own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely … to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel.”

In 1947 Einstein and economist Oskar Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam because they were concerned about his unpredictable behavior: During his voluminous preparation for the exam, Gödel said, he had uncovered a flaw in the U.S. constitution that could lead to a dictatorship. Einstein and Morgenstern told him that the exam would really be quite simple and urged him not to prepare so extensively.

At the hearing, judge Phillip Forman asked Gödel:

“Now, Mr. Gödel, where do you come from?”

“Where I come from? Austria.”

“What kind of government did you have in Austria?”

“It was a republic, but the constitution was such that it finally was changed into a dictatorship.”

“Oh! That is very bad. This could not happen in this country.”

“Oh, yes,” Gödel said. “I can prove it.”

“So of all the possible questions, just that critical one was asked by the Examinor,” Morgenstern wrote later. “Einstein and I were horrified during this exchange; the Examinor was intelligent enough to quickly quieten Gödel and say, ‘Oh, God, let’s not go into this.'”

The logician got his citizenship and the friends returned to Princeton. What was the flaw that Gödel had found? There’s no record of it in Morgenstern’s account, so we don’t know. Stephen Hawking suggests that it involved the president’s power to fill vacancies during Senate recesses, and Barry University law professor F.E. Guerra-Pujol conjectures that it might involve the constitution’s power to amend itself. Maybe it’s best if we never discover it.

(Thanks, Louis.)

Round Numbers

I found this surprising. What’s the volume of a ball of radius 1 in various dimensions?

In one dimension it’s a line segment of length 2.

In two dimensions it’s a unit disc in the plane, with area π.

In three dimensions it’s a unit ball with volume 4π/3.

Intuitively we might expect the number to keep rising. But it doesn’t!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Volumes_of_unit_balls.svg

In fact it peaks at five dimensions, and it drops quite sharply after that. In 20 dimensions the volume is only 0.026, and the limiting value is zero. Wikipedia explains the math.

Left or Right?

https://pixabay.com/en/natural-starry-sky-night-view-2065714/

A curious physics puzzle from Mark Levi’s excellent Why Cats Land on Their Feet: Suppose two astronauts, Al and Bob, are strapped to opposite ends of a space capsule’s interior, Al on the left and Bob on the right. Al is holding a large helium balloon, and everything is at rest. If Al pushes the balloon toward Bob, which way will the capsule drift?

It would be reasonable to guess that the capsule will drift to the left. Newton’s third law says that action equals reaction, so as Al pushes the balloon to the right, the balloon pushes Al to the left, and since he’s strapped to the capsule, he and it should drift left.

In fact the capsule will drift right as well. Because there are no external forces, the center of mass of the whole system is fixed. The helium balloon has less mass than the air it displaces, so from Al’s point of view the center of mass moves left. But the center of mass of the whole system is fixed in space, so the capsule must move right from the point of view of an external observer.

One way to make this intuitive is to imagine that the capsule is full of water rather than air. The mass of water essentially stays in place while we transfer a bubble of helium from the water’s left to its right. To accommodate this, the shell (whose mass we neglect) must move to the right.

Missive

In May 1936 a publisher invited Albert Einstein to contribute a message to be sealed in a metal box in the cornerstone of a new library wing in his country home, to be opened a thousand years hence. He sent this:

Dear Posterity,

If you have not become more just, more peaceful, and generally more rational than we are (or were) — why then, the Devil take you.

(From Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann, eds., Albert Einstein, the Human Side, 1979.)

An Odd Bond

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Six-rubberband_link.svg

This arrangement of rubber bands is “Brunnian”: Though the bands are entangled, no two are directly linked; and though no band can be extricated from the mass, cutting any one of them will free all the others.

By following the pattern here, any number of bands can be joined in a configuration with the same properties.

Bullseye

During World War I, British physicist G.I. Taylor was asked to design a dart to be dropped onto enemy troops from the air. He and a colleague dropped a bundle of darts as a trial and then “went over the field and pushed a square of paper over every dart we could find sticking out of the ground.”

When we had gone over the field in this way and were looking at the distribution, a cavalry officer came up and asked us what we were doing. When we explained that the darts had been dropped from an airplane, he looked at them and, seeing a dart piercing every sheet remarked: ‘If I had not seen it with my own eyes I would never have believed it possible to make such good shooting from the air.’

(The darts were never used — “we were told they were regarded as inhuman weapons and could not be used by gentlemen.”)

(From T.W. Körner, The Pleasures of Counting, 1996.)

Perspective

Artist Patrick Hughes calls this illusion “reverspective” — the “end” of each gallery hallway is actually nearest the viewer.

“Hughes acknowledges that these types of paintings have been his most successful and they continue to intrigue him,” writes Brad Honeycutt in The Art of Deception. “As such, he says that he could very well concentrate on creating paradoxical perspective pictures for the rest of his days.”

More examples.

The Martians

In the first half of the 20th century, a considerable number of famous scientists emigrated from Hungary to the United States, including physicists Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Dennis Gabor and mathematicians Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Paul Halmos, George Pólya, and Paul Erdős. Most were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, but they had surprising further similarities — many had been born near Budapest, had shown an early interest in chemistry, and had studied physics at German universities before emigrating to America.

One of their number, Leo Szilard, joked that he knew the reason: They were all descended from a Martian scout force that had landed on Earth in that period. The Martians had left eventually, but not before impregnating some Earth women.

The “Martians” adopted Szilard’s name because in many ways they felt themselves to be outsiders in America: All were brilliant, spoke English with a strong accent, and came from a small little-known country.

When Enrico Fermi posed his famous paradox — if intelligent aliens are as common as we believe, why haven’t we encountered one? — Szilard answered, “They are among us — but they call themselves Hungarians.”

(Thanks, Rini.)