Tag Archives: cookies

More cookies

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Brent

I recently received the following interesting problem from Shadowcat, which is a generalization of the cookie problem I’ve written about previously. We again want to count the ways to distribute identical cookies to non-identical students, with the twist that we … Continue reading →

Posted in arithmetic, challenges, counting | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Distributing cookies: solutions

Posted on April 14, 2009 by Brent

And now for some solutions to the cookie distribution problem. I’m actually going to describe four different methods of solution, and thereby (re)discover some nice combinatorial identities along the way. This is what I love about combinatorics—you discover all this … Continue reading →

Posted in counting, proof, solutions | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Distributing cookies

Posted on April 1, 2009 by Brent

Here’s a neat problem I saw in a recent post by Steven Miller on the Williams College math department blog. The problem comes from an old Putnam competition, one of the most prestigious college mathematics competitions. (It’s also one of … Continue reading →

Posted in challenges, counting | Tagged , , | 23 Comments