Bidding Optimally on ' The Price Is Right '
What is the best strategy in the bidding game on The Rice Is Right? Over the last twenty-four years, the television g...
On Words and Symbols
College catalogs, not the most edifying reading available on most campuses, do occasionally reflect trends that signa...
The Prisoner's Dilemma
Albert W. Tucker's note (on the preceding page), which is published here for the first time, was the first written de...
Social Choice Theory
The question of how a group of individuals should choose from among a set of alternatives has drawn the attention of ...
Khachian's Algorithm
SOVIET DISCOVERY ROCKS MATHEMATICAL WORLD Last November, sensational headlines appeared widely in the news amid repo...
Nonnumeric Algorithms
For the first ten years of their existence, computers were used exclusively t o execute numerical calculations. In fa...
A Revolution in Secret Codes
In October, 1977, the respected Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers was startled to receive a cryptic w...
Microcomputer Graphics
Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. In our algebra, trigonometry, and calculus courses, we ackno...
Complex Numbers In Basic
First courses in abstract or modern applied algebra are concerned with the investigation of mathematical structures, ...
Numerical Algorithms
The term algorithm it self is derived from the name of a ninth century Persian author, Abu Jafar Mohammed ibn Musa a1...
Operating Systems
A computing system can, in general, be discussed from two points of view: its hardware and its software. In this cont...
Holomorphic Functions
What accounts for these differences betweeen real and complex differentiable functions? First, when z and f ( z ) are...
Structured Programming
In t he early days of the computer industry, the development of software proceeded ad hoc. As technological advances ...
LOGO is for Learning
LOGO is a computer language invented by Seymour Papert at the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the late s...
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (commonly referred to as A.I.) can be regarded as a subfield of computer science, or more bro...
What is Operations Research?
In advising students about opportunities for jobs or graduate study in mathematics, I find it helpful to subdivide ap...
Management Science
Management science uses the scientific method to develop solutions for management decision problems. For example, a p...
An Application of the Classical Lot-Size Formula
The classic inventory problem asks how many items should be made per batch to minimize the total costs of production....
Attacking the Spruce Budworm
While the spruce budworm poses a severe threat to spruce-fir forests of Canada and the northern United States, the th...
The Euler Number and Computer Vision
The world of computing stands at the brink of what may be a revolution, the use of parallel processing to speed up ca...
Analysis of Supermarket Checkouts
Consider the following scenario. You go to the supermarket and select 11 items. Upon reaching the checkout area, you ...
Handicapping a Championship Series with Elementary Symmetric Polynomials
On June 2, 1987, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics met in Los Angeles for the first game of the 1987 Nati...
Winning Streaks, Shutouts, and the Length of the World Series
In a recent article in this Journal [Brunner 19871, the theory of absorbing Markov chains was applied to the expected...
Cutting a Counter
The purpose of this article is to present an example of the usefulness of trigonometry and linear algebra to solve a ...
Insurance Policies with Deductibles
Many health insurance policies carry a deductible. It is the amount below which the insurance company has no responsi...
Common Wisdom, Logarithmic Differentiation, and Compound Interest
Recently Michael RRed criticized the calculus curriculum for teaching how to differentiate functions of the form f (z...
Waste Minirnization via Cutting Stock Models
We discuss a class of linear programming minimization models known as cutting stock, trim loss, or bin packing models...
Distribution of Dopamine in the Brain
We construct a three-dimensional unsteady-state mass transport model to predict the behavior of dopamine levels in th...
Error Detecting Schemes Using Dihedral Groups
With inexpensive, fast, and reliable scanning devices and computers, it is now standard practice to append a check di...
Spherical Geometry in Medical Imaging
Assume that energy (sound, light, heat, or radiation) is radiating uniformly in all directions from a point source, w...
Racquetball as a Stochastic Process
Racquetball, volleyball, squash, and badminton are games in which one player (or team) serves, points are won only wh...
Commentary on Spherical Geometry in Medical Imaging
In Moore and Moore [19901, we gave exercises (Exercises 1, 7, and 8) that ask the reader to find the dihedral angle f...
Finding Best Approximate Circle
The Mathematical Modeling (MA363) class in the fall of 1990 was populated by 10 mathematics and computer science majo...
The Wright Stuff
I would like to take you back to December 17,1903, near the town of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where two brothers fr...
Braess's Paradox: A Puzzler from Applied Network Analysis
In late 1990, the New York Times carried a story concerning traffic flow, which was not the usual bad news of gridloc...