A Mathematician's Holiday

Oxford University

Journey with the Mathemagicians as they encounter a number of problems on their travels and use mathematics to find solutions. The series of short videos is suitable for secondary school teachers, introducing various maths principles to students in an engaging way.

Episodes

  1. 24/10/2014 · VIDEO

    Medicine muddle - Encoding and Binary

    Given four bottles with indistinguishable liquid, one of which is a vital medicine, two containers and a test that can be done only once, how can you determine which of the the bottles contain the medicine?

    5 min

  2. 24/10/2014 · VIDEO

    Dim Sum - Coding efficiency

    In a restaurant where you can order tasting plates of 10 items, what is the smallest number of plates you can order to identify all 10 items on a menu?

    10 min

  3. 24/10/2014 · VIDEO

    Fix the Hotel Rooms - Topology

    By drawing on a piece of paper, can you connect three houses to three utilities (gas, electricity, water) without any of the lines crossing?

    5 min

  4. 24/10/2014 · VIDEO

    The Tiny Lift - Graphs

    How can you get three people to the upper floor of the hotel if two of them can never be left alone?

    12 min

  5. 24/10/2014 · VIDEO

    Hotel fire - Optimisation

    What is the quickest route to get from where you are standing, collect some water from a river and get to the hotel?

    9 min

  6. 24/10/2014 · VIDEO

    Bags mix-up- Logic and Decision Trees

    Three bags contain 2 t-shirts or 2 hoodies or 1 hoodie and 1 t-shirt, and none are labelled correctly. Can you tell which back belongs to whom by only taking one (random) item from one bag?

    8 min

  7. 24/10/2014 · VIDEO

    Late for the plane - Abstraction and Optimisation

    What is the quickest route between two points, if you can only cross the runways at a perpendicular?

    8 min

  8. 24/10/2014 · VIDEO

    Airport security - Trilinear Coordinates

    How do we measure out 100ml of a liquid using only containers taking quantities of 75ml, 125ml and 200ml?

    23 min

  9. 24/10/2014 · VIDEO

    Planning the tour - Abstraction and Graph Theory

    How do you construct a tour travelling between a number of different cities, but never using the same transport method between two cities more than once?

    7 min
  • 9 Episodes

About

Journey with the Mathemagicians as they encounter a number of problems on their travels and use mathematics to find solutions. The series of short videos is suitable for secondary school teachers, introducing various maths principles to students in an engaging way.

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