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Thomas Woolley

Series featuring Thomas Woolley

  • A Mathematician's Holiday
# Episode Title Description People Date
9 Medicine muddle - Encoding and Binary Given four bottles with indistinguishable liquid, one of which is a vital medicine, two containers and a test that can be done only once, how can you determine which of the the bottles contain the medicine? Thomas Woolley, William Binzi 24 Oct 2014
8 Dim Sum - Coding efficiency In a restaurant where you can order tasting plates of 10 items, what is the smallest number of plates you can order to identify all 10 items on a menu? Thomas Woolley, William Binzi 24 Oct 2014
7 Fix the Hotel Rooms - Topology By drawing on a piece of paper, can you connect three houses to three utilities (gas, electricity, water) without any of the lines crossing? Thomas Woolley, William Binzi 24 Oct 2014
6 The Tiny Lift - Graphs How can you get three people to the upper floor of the hotel if two of them can never be left alone? Thomas Woolley, William Binzi 24 Oct 2014
5 Hotel fire - Optimisation What is the quickest route to get from where you are standing, collect some water from a river and get to the hotel? Thomas Woolley, William Binzi 24 Oct 2014
4 Bags mix-up- Logic and Decision Trees Three bags contain 2 t-shirts or 2 hoodies or 1 hoodie and 1 t-shirt, and none are labelled correctly. Can you tell which back belongs to whom by only taking one (random) item from one bag? Thomas Woolley, William Binzi 24 Oct 2014
3 Late for the plane - Abstraction and Optimisation What is the quickest route between two points, if you can only cross the runways at a perpendicular? Thomas Woolley, William Binzi 24 Oct 2014
2 Airport security - Trilinear Coordinates How do we measure out 100ml of a liquid using only containers taking quantities of 75ml, 125ml and 200ml? Thomas Woolley, William Binzi 24 Oct 2014
1 Planning the tour - Abstraction and Graph Theory How do you construct a tour travelling between a number of different cities, but never using the same transport method between two cities more than once? Thomas Woolley, William Binzi 24 Oct 2014