Have you watched Arrival? If not, here’s the synopsis. 12 alien vessels appear unannounced and hover over 12 different locations on Earth. Experts from different countries make contact with the extra-terrestrials, trying to decide if they are friend or foe. The only problem is that the aliens communicate using arcane circular symbols, unintelligible to Earthlings. The breakthrough comes with the discovery of the encrypted repeating decimal of 0.08̅3̅ (i.e. 0.08333…) in the sy

In ancient Egypt, fractions were usually given in unit-fraction form. Unit fractions are fractions with one as the numerator. Examples of unit fractions are 1/2, 1/3, 1/12, 1/145. Conversely, 2/3, 5/2, 4/7, etc., are not unit fractions. Hence, in ancient Egypt, 2/3 would have been expressed this way: 1/2 + 1/6 Go on! Try adding the above two unit fractions and see if they total up to 2/3. Today, Egyptian fractions are mainly used in recreational maths; doing maths for fun

Time to reassess my objective. What I'm really interested in is the cheapest way to place my order. That means what I should be focusing on at this point is the price discrepancy among the different combos, rather than the absolute total amount. With this in mind, I scan the price list again. The presence of some round dollar amounts and a healthy 'number sense' lead me to discover something. The difference in cost between the Fries + Coke combo and Wedges + Coke combo for al

It's 9:25 pm and I haven't had dinner yet. I've just spent the better part of the last hour discussing with Mr Sim about how melting ice affects the level of water in a container. It's for one of the questions he's setting concerning volume. No, it's not for Science, but Maths. Yes, Mr Sim is one who takes his 'real-life' questions to whole new levels (pun intended). All that thinking has made me hungry. I guess what scientists say about the brain consuming 20% of body's tota

This is how the prices look like: I steal a furtive glance behind me. The coast is no clear - no impatient customers peeping over my shoulder. I make it My mission in life, at least for the next 5 minutes, to find the most cost-efficient way to place my order. Punching numbers into my phone calculator is not an option; it's not cool. The most direct approach involves listing all the order permutations. In Primary Maths Heuristics, this bulldozer approach is known as (unsurpr