Well, look at this. More than 2 years of inactivity on this website and my Github account overall. The chance anybody is still looking here for new posts is rather slim, but well, I’ve never done this for the audience anyway.

Something happened a few weeks ago to get me out of my slumber. A juicy math problem from a puzzle book I was reading, made even juicier by the fact that I was able to solve it on my own with pen, paper and some thinking, sent me running to a code editor to write down a Python implementation for the solution. You can find both the code and a complete explanation of the problem and solution on the new Spinning switches repository.

I was then discussing this book at an informal “book club” meeting I attend, and one of the regulars there is a math graduate and enthusiast. He took it several steps further than just solving the problem as presented on the book: he developed theories on various properties of this problem (and the solution), and proved most of them as well. You can find all this over at its blog (post 1 and follow-up).

The unanswered question is whether this (or a similar, less gamified) topic has been explored already in the academic math community, or if it is just a puzzle in a book and nobody has thought much about it over than looking for the solution (like I did). I told my math friend he should definitely write to the book author and present its findings :)

Sadly, like all good and fun things, I’ve now finished the book. But it went away with a bang, with a problem whose solution I found so interesting I am planning to do more research on it. I am not sure there will be any coding project out of this, but if I do find what I am looking for, a new post will be in order.