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Marilyn & Zero



David Dockstader <DRDOCK00@UKCC.UKY.EDU> added
It took a long time for 0 to be accepted by mathematicians, and the rest of
the world is still struggling to accept it. There is the same problem with
infinity and it is often not clear to me why something that looks all the
world like infinity to me has to be "undefined".


On Mon, 06 Oct 1997 03:45:10 EDT Thomas L Wayburn said:
Marilyn: Here's a good math puzzle for you: Say that a 30-foot cable is
suspended between the tops of two 20-foot poles on level ground. The
lowest point of the cable is 5 feet above the ground. What is the
distance the two Poles?

and a year or so ago Marilyn had ANOTHER problem with accepting zero as a
'real' value. The problem was approximately as follows:

Given 45 pennies and ten envelopes, how can you put pennies into envelopes
such that no two of the envelopes has the same number of pennies.

Her response was that it couldn't be done. But putting ZERO pennies in one
envelope lets the other nine each contain one thru nine pennies. I don't
recall anyone calling her on this one.


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