In the past few days, I’ve seen a couple of good little math problems posted on Twitter. I follow a number of mathematicians, including James Tanton (@jamestanton), who pretty regularly posts math problems that are sometimes easy enough that I have a fair chance of solving them (though he almost never provides any solutions, so it’s sometimes hard to tell if I’ve gotten it right). A couple of days ago, he asked a simple question:
This is not a terribly difficult problem to solve as long as you can sum a particular doubly-infinite series, but summing that series is probably the most interesting part of the problem.
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