I just came up with the idea to have a weekly thread giving some sort of mathematical challenge to test the minds of the people in the community and to prevent the loss of mental capability now that the school terms are coming to a close in many places. These will work by me posting one or two problems every week. I'm thinking that I will post one simple one, and a slightly more interesting one.
In the threads, feel free to ask questions and you will get help as long as the answers don't give the end result. To submit an answer, please send it in a pm along with something that shows that you did work. This can be anything from a picture of you working it out on paper or the source for a program that you wrote to get your answer. If the answer is correct, I will congratulate you in the next thread. Please do not give out the answer in the thread. I will have the answer to the previous week's problem(s) in each new thread if you weren't able to figure it out and want to know.
Here we go!
Remember to try to have fun with this and to not kill yourself over not being able to figure these out. If you have specific questions you'd like to ask me, go ahead and do so by finding me in one of the IRC channels I frequent.
I'd like to give special thanks to Bigbaddy who gave me the idea for the second problem.
Edit: I fixed a typo in the first problem that made it slightly simpler than I intended.
In the threads, feel free to ask questions and you will get help as long as the answers don't give the end result. To submit an answer, please send it in a pm along with something that shows that you did work. This can be anything from a picture of you working it out on paper or the source for a program that you wrote to get your answer. If the answer is correct, I will congratulate you in the next thread. Please do not give out the answer in the thread. I will have the answer to the previous week's problem(s) in each new thread if you weren't able to figure it out and want to know.
Here we go!
- Come up with a way of finding the sum of the first n even numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. If you don't remember what this is, it is a sequence where the first two terms are 1 and after that, each term is equal to the sum of the previous two terms (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ...).
- Expand (a + b)^n given that n is a positive integer.
Remember to try to have fun with this and to not kill yourself over not being able to figure these out. If you have specific questions you'd like to ask me, go ahead and do so by finding me in one of the IRC channels I frequent.
I'd like to give special thanks to Bigbaddy who gave me the idea for the second problem.
Edit: I fixed a typo in the first problem that made it slightly simpler than I intended.