Re: Fun Fact About a Fun Fact
- From: R H Draney <dadoctah@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 22 Apr 2007 22:08:36 -0700
Helen Read filted:
R H Draney wrote:
Helen Read filted:
This week's Fun Fact #2, "There are 293 ways to make change for a
dollar" is true. It sounded about right, so I checked and did the
calculation. The total number of ways to make $1 using any combination
of pennies, nickels, dimes, half-dollars, and dollars, is indeed 293.
Mental image du jour: you sitting at a table behind 293 little piles of
coins....r
Brute force counting would be so crass. I did it a much more elegant
way: I set up a generating function, and used Mathematica software to
calculate the desired coefficient.
Mathematica, bah!...in my day we didn't have no Mathematica, and no stinkin'
graphing calculators either...we did numerical analysis the old-fashioned way,
as Sir Isaac intended, with pencil and paper, and big smelly well-thumbed books
of integrals, and (if your daddy was rich) a slide rule a yard and a half
long....r
--
"You got Schadenfreude on my Weltanschauung!"
"You got Weltanschauung in my Schadenfreude!"
.
- References:
- Fun Fact About a Fun Fact
- From: Helen Read
- Re: Fun Fact About a Fun Fact
- From: R H Draney
- Re: Fun Fact About a Fun Fact
- From: Helen Read
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