One of my pet peeves about people and math is that most
\npeople don’t really have a clue of what math is. I’ve been writing
\nthis blog for something over three years, and by the standards of
\na lot of people, I’ve almost never written about math.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, my son’s kindergarten class had a picnic. On my way home,
\nI was listening to the local NPR station, which was interviewing some
\ncrossword puzzle writer whose name I cannot remember; I will therefore refer
\nto him as “crossword-boy”. (It was not Will Shortz; Shortz is much smarter than the
\nguy they were interviewing.) At one point, they asked him something about
\nSudoku.<\/p>\n
His response was a bit disjointed – he couldn’t decide whether to talk about
\nthe history of Sudoku or about his opinion of it. His opinion is that it’s
\nincredibly dull and pointless, and that designing good Sudoku doesn’t require as
\nmuch creativity as designing good crosswords. (Just that much is annoying: I’m
\na Sudoku addict, and I’ve definitely noticed dramatic differences in Sudokus
\nfrom different places. Will Shortz’s Sudoku books have great ones; most computerized
\nSudoku games generate rather boring ones; the ones in most newspapers are
\nobviously computer generated.)<\/p>\n
In the course of babbling about how uninteresting, non-creative, and Because it doesn’t rely on arithmetic, according to crossword-boy, Sorry pal, but logic is math<\/em>.<\/p>\n Sudoku is an incredibly mathematical puzzle. It’s not an Math is more than arithmetic. It’s more than numbers. Math One of my pet peeves about people and math is that most people don’t really have a clue of what math is. I’ve been writing this blog for something over three years, and by the standards of a lot of people, I’ve almost never written about math. Yesterday, my son’s kindergarten class had a picnic. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-logic"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-cD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nunsatisfying Sudoko puzzles are, he let loose with the real stupidity: “You know,
\nSudoku doesn’t even have to use numbers, it can use any 9 symbols. It’s not a
\nmathematical puzzle at all<\/em>. <\/p>\n
\nit’s not mathematical at all<\/em>. He went on to say that it’s
\njust a logic<\/em> puzzle, not a math puzzle at all.<\/p>\n
\narithmetic<\/em> puzzle, but it’s a highly mathematical one.
\nIn computer science terms, it’s a moderately
\ncomplex constraint-solving puzzle.<\/p>\n
\nis really the formal study of logic and structure. Numbers and arithmetic
\nare one kind of structured system described using logic which can be
\nstudied and understood using math. But pretty much everything<\/em>
\nwith a precise, formal structure to it has at least an element of
\nmathematics. The structure of crossword-boy’s crossword puzzles
\nis fundamentally mathematical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"