http://mathfactor.uark.edu/2012/01/hg-two-love/ The Math Factor Podcast Site Fri, 08 Aug 2014 12:52:06 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.25 http://mathfactor.uark.edu/2012/01/hg-two-love/comment-page-1/#comment-930 Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:21:12 +0000 http://mathfactor.uark.edu/?p=1367#comment-930 Hi! Love the podcast . I was wondering, maybe you could explain in a simple way Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer  conjecture. I’ve been reading about this but cannot understand it. Btw. I’m 16 so maybe this is the reason. = ) 
I’m very glad you record this podcast.
Aleksandra, Poland 

]]> http://mathfactor.uark.edu/2012/01/hg-two-love/comment-page-1/#comment-929 Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:07:08 +0000 http://mathfactor.uark.edu/?p=1367#comment-929 I couldn’t figure the connection between 503 and the first four primes, until I accidentally cubed each of them and found that 503 is the sum of all 4 cubes! About the M&Ms – the first swap of 50 M&Ms makes each pile (bag, box, etc) 90% as pure as it was before (red becomes 90% red and blue becomes 90% blue). At this point I assume the M&Ms are uniformly mixed in each pile. The next time, 81% of the original color is kept but 10% of the original color which was taken away the first time is returned so the pile is 82% its original color. This continues with the colors getting more and more evenly mixed until about 20 swaps when each M&M scoop is, on average, half red and half blue. This is exactly the same as the old puzzle about moving a teaspoon back and forth between a barrel of water and a barrel of wine (each barrel of same capacity) and eventually both barrels are half water and half wine as near as you can measure (within a few micrograms). I can’t come up with an equation to measure how fast this occurs, however.

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