Books

Independent solutions, verified in code, to problems from Stan Wagon's Problem of the Week. Each chapter states the problem with attribution, solves it from scratch, and closes with the program that confirms the answer, including the cases where the published problem does not say quite what it means to say.

A working draft, opening with two problems that both turned on reading the statement carefully. Problem 1416 asks for twelve queens on a fourteen-square board, which a counting argument shows cannot be done as posed, though a twelve-square reading can and the any-slope variant revives the original numbers. Problem 1417 asks for the average shadow of a cube, which is Cauchy’s theorem of 1850, and the sampling recipe printed alongside it quietly answers a different question.

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