This month’s Geek Challenge was created in conjunction with Kevin Ferrigno. The challenge is to pick the winners of this year’s NCAA tournament, not by choosing teams, but by picking the winning formula. You can use this spreadsheet to pr...
On February 29th, DMC celebrated Leap Day with a little friendly competition. With some tape on the floor, I set up an event court for a Standing Long Jump competition. Standing Long Jump was an Olympic event until from 1900-1912, and I r...
The following is a supplement to Geek Challenge Results: New Year's Beeramid by the Numbers. The partial summation of xy This function can be solved to a polynomial of order y+1 by the method outlined here. Below is a graphical represen...
January's Geek Challenge questioned the construction of a New Year's Eve party beer can pyramid. I first encountered this challenge in my freshman year at Marquette. I was building the beeramid with five other students at a band party, some w...
During a New Year's Eve party, a simple pyramid was constructed by standing 3 beer cans on a table in a triangle, and then placing a single can on the top center of the three. The pyramid was expanded by expanding the triangular base to 3 ca...
We didn’t receive a lot of reader-feedback to last month's Geek Challenge. Some questioned the assumptions involved, and some guesses were taken. Here is my analysis of the problem: The Deer Dilemma asks about the probability of collisio...
A state forest is square and 6 miles on each side, and known to be home to a population of 1,000 deer. A road runs straight through the forest (not diagonally) and is silently traveled by an electric car whose driver is oblivious to the deer.&n...
Last month’s Geek Challenge asked where in line was the optimum place to stand such that your birthday matches the birthday of anyone in front of you, but that nobody in front of you has made the same match with someone in front of them. &...
A small movie theater has two movie screens. One theater is showing a hit action movie, and has sold out for the evening. The other screen is showing a comedy flop and has plenty of available seats. A crowd has gathered outside the ...
The question posed during last month’s Geek Challenge was to determine how much it costs me in extra gas to drive to my summer road trip destination at a higher speed, and to express this cost measured against the time I save by driving there faster....