Category: Uncategorized

Goodbye for now

My friends,

I want to say thank you and goodbye for now. I’m taking a break from adult education for the rest of this year. I’ll be traveling and exploring other interests for a while. Starting in May 2025, my wife Alex and I will be biking from Vancouver, CA to San Diego. I’ll be posting photos and stories from the road at @eappleton on Instagram and birdfruit.wordpress.com.

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A Chess Puzzle

Inspired by the hit TV show The Queen’s Gambit, we tackled a chess puzzle in February’s evening meeting. Sophie shared a problem from one of Alex Bellos’s recent Monday Math Puzzles. Here it is:



Before we went into our breakout rooms, we spent a bit of time clarifying the ways that a Queen can move on the board, and making sure we agreed about which squares were “unattacked” or “safe.” (We had some debate about the square that the Queen is sitting on. In the end, we decided that this was not a safe square.)

Check out the Jamboard to see some of the work we did (or don’t, if you don’t want any spoilers!) One question we found intriguing was, “how do you know when you’ve found the best answer?”

Since then, many of us have been playing chess on chess.com. We’re even thinking about starting a CAMI chess club. Want to play? Send us a message and we’ll loop you in.

Why are maintenance covers round?

In the December evening meeting, Amy Vickers led us through a new exploration that was loosely inspired by last month’s meeting on some circles.

As a warm-up, Amy presented us with this question: Why might a manhole cover (or, in the gender-neutral, maintenance cover) be round? One of the central ideas that came up in the resulting discussion was that a circle won’t fall through its own hole, no matter which way you turn it. It has a constant diameter, or constant width.

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Rainbow Squares

Warm-up:

We started with a quick game of online Simon Says.

It was okay, but a little clunky. Usha suggested a different kind of activity where video on means yes and video off means no. Read a series of statements. Here are a few I brainstormed: Winter is my favorite season of the year. I love ice cream. I am excited to be back in school. I want to go to college. (You probably have better examples.) End with a statement everyone can say yes to…

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Apportionment Math!

For November’s evening meeting, Eric led us through an interesting exploration of past and present methods of determining how many congressional seats to apportion to states of various populations.

The meeting began with the following warm up:

An adult education program is hiring 37 teachers to teach at 3 different sites. Each teacher can work at one site only.

Site A: 1500 students/year

Site B: 1000 students/year

Site C: 100 students/year

How many teachers should go to each site?

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The Secretary Problem

Audrey introduced the group to a classic problem from optimal stopping theory (whatever that is). 🙂

If you’re on the search for a new secretary, how would you choose who to hire? For June’s evening CAMI meeting, Audrey shared a classic problem with the group:

The Popular Secretarial Problem!

There are N applicants for a secretarial position. The applicants are interviewed in random order, and you must accept or reject a candidate immediately after interviewing them.

After you reject someone, there is no way to bring them back.

There is only one position available. So as soon as you accept a candidate, you’re done. What strategy should you use in order to maximize the likelihood of hiring the best candidate out of the N applicants?

Some of the assumptions we used when exploring the problem:

  • There is one best candidate.
  • If you could see all the candidates at one (you can’t), you would be able to rank them all from best to worst.
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