The Mathematics of Christmas
December 27th, 2005 by SplineGuy
This may be a tad late for the season, but I found it quite interesting. Check out the full article.
The Mathematics of Christmas by Keith Devlin
I guess it was an early sign that I was heading for a career in mathematics that, when I was a young child, the run-up to Christmas always presented me with a numerical puzzle. How could Santa Claus possibly visit all children at midnight on the same night? I never did get a satisfactory answer from my parents, whose stock response was “No one knows; he just does.”
These days, the adult me can address the question in a mathematically more sophisticated way. Just how big is the task facing Santa on Christmas Eve? [more]
