Maths prize for 14 July: skyscrapers

Sanjoy Mahajan’s books on insight vs calculation in maths

Fortnightly maths prize for 24 February

No prize-winners this time. Though I know (because they told me) that the year 13 Further Maths students worked out answers, none of them wrote down the answers and handed them in, so no prizes.

If all the people of the world stood shoulder-to-shoulder (with the babies in slings, and the old and sick people held up by the people next to them), how much area would we cover?

Fortnightly prize question for 16 December 2014

Sometime in May 1936, Alan Turing sighed with satisfaction as he finished his paper “On Computable Numbers”, which is now famous as the start of computer science (though the first electronic computer was not built until 1943). Take a deep breath. How likely is it that you inhale an atom which was also in Turing’s sigh?